'Nakedly transactional': How Trump is allowing donors free rein to profit from Cabinet roles

Watchdog groups are warning that the Cabinet that President-elect Donald Trump is assembling is already showing signs of being a pay-for-play arrangement in which his biggest backers are rewarded with the ability to shape government policy in their favor.

According to a Tuesday report in the Guardian, the president-elect is raising red flags with several of his Cabinet picks, who are slated to oversee agencies regulating the industries in which they have a significant financial stake. In one example, Interior Secretary-designate Doug Burgum – the current Republican governor of North Dakota with close ties to fracking magnate Harold Hamm — will be in charge of issuing oil and gas drilling licenses.

Hamm himself donated roughly $4 million to Trump's election effort, while soliciting additional donations from others in the industry. The Guardian reported that the oil and gas industry put up approximately $75 million toward sending Trump back to the White House. Hamm was also at the Mar-a-Lago meeting in which Trump asked the oil industry to pony up $1 billion to his reelection bid in exchange for favorable policies.

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Other Trump Cabinet appointees, like Department of Commerce secretary-designate Howard Lutnick and Department of Education secretary-designate Linda McMahon, also donated millions of dollars to Trump's bid for the presidency. According to the Guardian's calculations, they donated $6 million and $21 million to his campaign and allied super PACs, respectively. Both are also the co-chairs of his presidential transition.

Meanwhile, billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — who spent more than $200 million of his own money to get Trump elected — is chairing a so-called "government efficiency" advisory board in which he'll be recommending steep, draconian budget cuts to the agencies regulating his businesses.

"Trump has taken the cliche that ‘all politics is local’ and turned it into ‘all politics is about personal payback’," former Federal Election Commission general counsel Larry Noble told the Guardian. "The naked transactional nature and potentially dangerous conflicts of interests reflected in Trump’s ongoing paybacks are unprecedented in modern times."

The president-elect was particularly open in his promises of exchanging policy for campaign cash while he was running his third campaign for the White House. In October, the New York Times reported that Trump has flip-flopped on numerous issues after being faced with the prospect of bringing in additional donations from wealthy contributors. This includes cryptocurrency, tobacco, marijuana and TikTok, among others.

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Saurav Ghosh of the Campaign Legal Center decried Trump's rewarding of political donors with Cabinet posts, saying his "transactional approach to governing epitomizes corruption and will sadly ensure that in his second term, big donors’ interests will continue to come before the needs of millions of Americans.

“Major donors have had a hand in shaping policy in every recent administration, but the unprecedented role that Musk and certain other donors, especially from the tech and finance industries, played in the campaign and are now playing in the transition means that their influence over the incoming administration’s agenda is likely to be unprecedented,” said Brennan Center for Justice director of elections and government Dan Weiner.

Click here to read the Guardian's report in its entirety.

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