Billionaires and Multimillionaires at the Helm
The Trump Administration’s emerging vision of good government and conflicts of interest
In a recent letter to President-elect Donald Trump raising ethical concerns about billionaire Elon Musk’s role in the Trump transition, Senator Elizabeth Warren noted that federal conflicts of interest rules “ensure government employees are working on behalf of the public interest rather than twisting government policy to line their own pockets.” The Trump transition team responded that Trump has assembled “the most impressive and qualified team of innovators, entrepreneurs, and geniuses to advise and staff our government,” and that the transition would abide by the “highest ethical and legal standards possible—a standard unfamiliar to a career politician whose societal impact is 1/1024th of Elon Musk’s.”
In this brief exchange one sees the outlines of a developing clash of “good government” philosophies at the dawn of the second Trump administration—not just about the shape and enforcement of conflict-of-interest rules but more broadly about the aims of government service.
Trump is populating his cabinet, and influential administration-adjacent slots, with an unprecedented number of billionaires and multimillionaires who view private sector success as the best background for fixing what ails the government and the economy. Many will serve in policy areas that directly implicate their business interests. As the response to Elizabeth Warren suggests, the incoming Trump administration appears ready to stake out a novel approach to what the deputy editor of the Financial Times has described as the potential for “huge financial as well as political conflicts of interest.”
In what follows we take a first crack at explaining this emerging approach to conflicts of interest in the senior management and staffing of government. Future posts will fill out this picture and address specific issues that arise.
The Trump 2.0 Challenge
The incoming administration seems poised to challenge conventional notions of good government by embracing two related tenets.
First, the line between the “public” and “private” interest inherent in traditional approaches to conflicts of interest must be adjusted to allow expansive simultaneous service in the private sector and at the highest levels of government. David Sacks, who will assume major responsibilities for AI policy, says he will “spend 50% of [his] time in D.C. guiding policy and 50% in Silicon Valley staying on the cutting edge,” an arrangement he says is “ideal for a tech policy role.” Musk, an influential advisor to Trump who will co-chair the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”), will continue to run his many companies.
Second, the public values supposedly served by traditional conflict of interest rules function as illegitimate barriers to entry that perpetuate the innovation-destroying dominance of the career governing class. Standard “conflict of interest” regulations favor left-leaning bureaucrats and government policy experts who have failed time and again. And it dissuades from government service the very people who know what they are doing, as evidenced by highly successful private sector careers.
This view of public sector expertise is consistent with how Sacks, Musk, and others portray themselves: as “non-regime thinker[s]” and agents of change whose private business successes have contributed more than the politicians and the bureaucrats to the public welfare. It was also implicit in Vice-President-elect Vance’s derision of “experts” who lack the “common sense” that Trump campaigned on, as he stated in an exchange with Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz in their debate last fall.
Behind the rejection of career government policy expertise is a reaction against progressive government theory dating back to the early twentieth century. On the progressive view, experts schooled in the relevant professions and social sciences bring neutral problem-solving skills to policy challenges. They can identify and pursue the “public interest” discernible beyond the clash of selfish “private interests.” In this regime, conflict of interest and other good government reforms guard against the corruption by private interests of the public interest so understood.
The contrary view, as critics have argued, is that this theory of good government undermines democracy by giving unrepresentative government policy experts control over the definition of the public interest. And this definition, the critique goes, builds a left-wing, big government bias into policymaking.
Legal Constraints and Workarounds
Congress to date has largely embraced the progressive public interest model. Consider revolving door laws that criminalize certain conflicts of interest. Among other restrictions, full or part-time government employees may not participate personally and substantially in a particular matter affecting their own and their family’s financial interests.
But officials can skirt this restriction if an ethics official determines “the interest is not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity of the services which the Government may expect from such officer or employee.”
This is not a determinant standard; it is a squishy one. In the hands of White House lawyers and a Trump Department of Justice conceivably disinclined to take a strict view of these matters, private sector employees could be brought into government roles in large numbers without rubbing up against legal liability. Congress normally would perform an additional and vital oversight and investigative role, but that might not happen in the Republican-controlled Congress we will likely have for at least the next two years.
And there are other workarounds. The classification of “special government employee” (SGE) already provides a mechanism for part-time government employees to retain their private sector roles and responsibilities. Sacks is reportedly set to become a SGE; Musk might be. SGEs can work on government matters while pursuing their private sector interests for up to 130 days each year.
An SGE is generally subject to conflict-of-interest controls, including the requirement that the SGE “recuse” from (i.e. refrain from involvement in) particular issues where they have an interest. But these safeguards can be weakened. We will spare you the details for now, but the 130 day-limit can be construed flexibly. And the recusal restrictions can be significantly watered down through case-by-case judgments by willing ethics and legal advisors appointed by Trump
SGEs are also relieved of the strict public transparency requirements that senior government employees typically must comply with and that allow for press, congressional and general public monitoring of conflicts of interest. The new administration could also circumvent the Federal Advisory Committee Act transparency rules that might otherwise apply to DOGE, either by declaring the statute unconstitutional or through other workarounds.
Politics and Complexities
Prior Republican administrations questioned the progressive good government model, but not to the extent being mapped out for Trump 2.0. Presidents Nixon and Reagan, for example, sought to shrink government while empowering it to promote a business-friendly climate through cabinet and sub-cabinet appointments with appointments from industry. But their administrations did not disavow conflict of interest standards; their application in particular cases might be disputed, but their significance in principle was not challenged. And, of course, for years, John McCain, the Republican presidential standard-bearer in 2008, defined his “maverick” brand in part as that of a reformer, deeply committed to robust government ethics and campaign finance reform concerned with conflict-of-interest corruption.
What may encourage Trump and his team in aggressively resetting the public/private boundaries in conflict-of-interest regulation is their conviction that the public does not much care. And they might be right, at least in the short term. Good government reforms have rarely swayed voters in large numbers. Trump can take comfort from his own experience in public life. He has refused, for example, to follow the once-firm norm requiring release as a candidate or president of his tax returns. For all the furor that followed in the elite press, including the revelation that in at least one year he paid no federal taxes, Trump did not suffer politically, as his improved performance in the 2024 election may indicate. And there is substantial scholarship to support the view that conflict-of-interest reform and regulation on the standard model does not influence public judgments of the quality or performance of their government.
Those defending Trump’s policy have another other argument in their arsenal. One need not be a DOGE-loving partisan to appreciate that in some contexts—artificial intelligence, drone and space technology, energy development, and much more—the government lacks adequate capacity and expertise and must depend to a significant degree on the private sector. An enhanced need for government extraction of private sector expertise might require a reassessment of how conflict-of-interest rules are applied in these circumstances, even if that reassessment should be done in a way that is attentive to the persisting dangers of private capture of government goods.
Appreciating what is novel in the Trump approach requires distinguishing different types of ethics quandaries. Some conflict questions will arise in Trump 2.0, as they have in the past, from Trump’s vast family business and his rejection of conventional limits other presidents have voluntarily adopted. This is a President-elect who, after all, promotes the sale of personally branded products like bibles and guitars. Trump has latitude to do as he wishes in this area since, as we explained in After Trump, a president is largely exempt from conflict-of-interest statutes.
What appears to be new, and in the long run possibly more important, is the relaxation of long-standing conflict-of interest standards just below the presidential level based on the claim that the public interest is best served by more, not less, private involvement in the government.
This will be a major issue in Trump 2.0 that will arise in many guises and that we will be covering closely.