The week before President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting, a key official in the agency that shapes his administration’s trade policy sold off as much as $30,000 of stock.

Two days before that so-called “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, a State Department official sold as much as $50,000 in stock, then bought a similar investment as prices fell.

And just before Trump made another significant tariff announcement, a White House lawyer sold shares in nine companies, records show.

More than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war, according to a ProPublica review of disclosures across the government.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.

Using nonpublic information learned at work to trade securities could violate the law. But even if such actions aren’t influenced by insider knowledge, ethics experts warn that trading stock while the federal government’s actions move markets can create the appearance of impropriety. The recent trades by government officials, they said, underscore that there should be tighter rules on how, or if, federal employees can trade securities.

“The executive branch is routinely engaged in activities that will move the market,” said Tyler Gellasch, who, as a congressional aide, helped write the law on insider trading by government officials and now runs a nonprofit focused on transparency and ethics in capital markets. “I don’t think members of Congress and executive branch officials should be trading securities. To the extent they have investment holdings, it should be managed by someone else outside their purview. The temptation to put their own personal self-interest ahead of their duties to the country is just too high.”

There is no evidence that the trades by government officials identified by ProPublica were informed by nonpublic information. Still, when government officials trade stock at opportune times, Gellasch said, even if it was based on luck and not inside information, it undermines trust in government and the markets

“It then becomes a thing where our markets look rigged,” he said.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the officials who made the trades either said they had no insider information that would help them time their decisions or did not respond to questions about the transactions.

Questions about trades based on nonpublic information have swirled around Congress for years and began anew after Trump’s tariffs announcements led to wild swings in the market. Lawmakers’ trades are automatically posted online and, after multiple congressional stock-trading scandals, are widely scrutinized as soon as they become public.

But less attention is paid to the trades of executive branch employees and congressional aides whose work could give them access to confidential information likely to influence markets once made public.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. After the market closed that day, Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs, sending the market reeling. Bondi’s ethics agreement required her to sell by early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. She has yet to answer questions about the trades, and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this week, ProPublica reported that Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, sold shares in almost three dozen companies on Feb. 11, two days before Trump announced plans to institute wide-ranging “reciprocal” tariffs. A Transportation Department spokesperson said Duffy’s account manager made the trades and that Duffy had no input on the timing.

Using insider government information to buy or sell securities could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading.

Thousands of government employees are required to file disclosure forms if they sell or buy securities worth more than $1,000. In many cases, the records are available only in person in Washington, D.C., or through a records request. The documents do not include exact amounts bought or sold but instead provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

ProPublica examined hundreds of records for trades shortly before major tariff announcements or other key government decisions. Trump, of course, repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he intended to institute dramatic tariffs on foreign imports. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume that his campaign promises were bluster. Several tariff announcements by Trump early on shook the markets, but it wasn’t until he detailed his new tariffs on April 2 that stocks dived.

Among those who sold securities before one of Trump’s main tariff announcements was Tobias Dorsey. Dorsey, a lawyer in the executive branch since the Obama administration, was named acting general counsel for the White House’s Office of Administration in January, when Trump was inaugurated. The division provides a range of services, including research and legal counseling across the president’s staff, including the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which helps craft trade policy. In his LinkedIn bio, Dorsey describes his duties since 2022 as giving “expert advice on a wide range of legal and policy matters to help White House officials achieve their policy goals.”

On Feb. 25 and 26, disclosure records show, Dorsey unloaded shares of an index fund and nine companies, including cleaning products manufacturer Clorox and engineering firm Emerson Electric. The total dollar figure for the sales was between $12,000 and $180,000. (He purchased one stock, defense contractor Palantir, which was selling for a bargain after recently plummeting on news of Pentagon budget cuts.)

At the time of Dorsey’s trades, investors were still largely in denial that Trump was going to go through with the massive tariffs he had promised during the campaign. But the next morning, Trump posted on social media that significant tariffs on Mexico and Canada “will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled” in several days, and that “China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date.”

The S&P 500, a stock index that tracks a wide swath of the market, fell almost 2% that day alone and ultimately dropped nearly 18% in six weeks.

In an interview, Dorsey said the sale was made by his wife from an account belonging to her. He said she decided to sell around $20,000 worth of shares so they could make tuition payments and that he had no nonpublic information on the impending tariff announcements. The kind of work he does as a career employee, he said, focuses not on public policy, but on how the White House operates, including personnel, workplace technology, contracts and records issues.

“I’m not advising Stephen Miller or Peter Navarro,” he said, referring to top policy advisers to the president. “I’m advising the people running the campus. … I don’t have access to any sensitive political information.”

Another well-timed set of transactions was made by Marshall Stallings, the director of intergovernmental affairs and public engagement for Trump’s Trade Representative. The office helps shape the White House’s trade policy and negotiates trade deals with foreign governments.

On March 25 and 27, Stallings sold between $2,000 and $30,000 of stock in retail giant Target and mining company Freeport-McMoRan. The sales appear to have been an abrupt U-turn. He had purchased the shares less than a week earlier. Days after Stallings’ sales, Trump unveiled his most dramatic tariffs. Target stock fell 17%. Freeport-McMoRan fell 25%.

Stallings and the Trade Representative’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A longtime State Department official, Stephanie Syptak-Ramnath, who until April was ambassador to Peru, also appeared to make a bet against the stock market. On March 24 and 25, she sold between $255,000 and $650,000 in stocks, and bought between $265,000 and $650,000 in bond and treasury funds (along with $50,000 to $100,000 in stocks). Then, on March 31, two days before Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, she sold between $15,000 and $50,000 of a broad-based stock fund. When the market started to plummet, she bought back the same dollar range in another stock fund. Syptak-Ramnath said she did not have any information about the administration's decisions beyond what was publicly available. The trades, she said, were “undertaken as a result of family obligations” and in “response to a changing economy.”

A second longtime State Department official, Gautam Rana, who is now ambassador to Slovakia, sold between $830,000 and $1.7 million worth of stock on March 19, a week before Trump declared new tariffs on cars and two weeks before his “Liberation Day” announcement. The shares he sold were largely broad-based index funds. Rana declined to comment for this story.

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer, said executive branch employees who don’t have nonpublic information and want to trade stock should consult with ethics officials before doing so, thereby allowing an independent third party to assess their actions.

“If you trade and you don’t seek advice in advance, you kind of do it at your own risk, and if you’re asked about it, you have to hope there aren’t factors that make someone question your motivations,” Canter said. “If you seek ethics official advice, you have some cover.”

Executive branch employees are barred from taking government actions that would narrowly benefit them personally, and some are required to sell stock in companies and industries they have purview over in their jobs. But like members of Congress, they are allowed to trade securities.

Since Trump’s tariff announcements and walkbacks began causing fluctuations in the market, questions have been raised about whether anyone has profited off advance notice of the moves. After Trump unexpectedly rolled back some of his tariffs in early April, causing stocks to surge, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned on social media that “any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 of stock the day before and the day of the announcement. The Georgia Republican has not said what motivated the trades but in the past said a financial adviser manages her investments without her input.

ProPublica’s review of disclosures also found trades by congressional aides that took place before the market tumbled.

Michael Platt, a veteran Republican staffer who served in the Commerce Department during Trump’s first term and now works for the House committee that handles administrative matters for the chamber, restructured his portfolio in March. An account under his wife’s name sold off between $96,000 and $390,000 in mostly American companies, and purchased at least $45,000 in foreign stocks and at least $15,000 in an American and Canadian energy index fund. Some stock forecasters considered international markets a relatively safe haven if Trump went through with his tariffs. Platt did not respond to requests for comment.

Stephanie Trifone, a Senate Judiciary Committee aide, sold stock in mid-March and bought at least $50,000 in treasuries. A spokesperson for the committee’s Democratic minority said Trifone had no nonpublic information about the tariffs and her trades were conducted by a financial adviser without her input. Kevin Wheeler, a staffer for the Senate Appropriations Committee, made a similar move. In late February, he and his spouse offloaded between $18,000 and $270,000 in funds composed almost entirely of stocks and bought between $50,000 and $225,000 in bonds. A spokesperson for the Appropriation Committee’s Republican majority said Wheeler had no nonpublic information about Trump’s tariff plans and that a financial planner made the trades after advising Wheeler to take a more conservative approach with his portfolio.

Another staffer, Ryan White, chief of staff to Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, bought shares worth between $2,000 and $30,000 in two precious metals mining companies two days before Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement. He continued buying more shares in the companies, Hecla Mining and Coeur Mining, in the following days.

Precious metals can be a safe haven during a bear market turn, but those stocks, like the rest of the market, declined after Trump’s tariff announcements.

Two days after White’s last purchase in April of the mining companies’ shares, however, the firms got some good news. A bill White’s boss introduced to make it easier for mining companies like Hecla and Coeur to operate on public lands was approved by a Senate committee, an important step in passing a bill. (White added to his Hecla shares earlier this month and sold his stake in Coeur.)

White told ProPublica that “all required reporting and ethics rules were followed.” Any suggestion that the committee passing the bill played a role in his stock purchases “is a stretch and patently false,” he said, adding that the legislation “has not become law and even if it does, would take decades to have any appreciable impact.”

The Feb. 11 sales occurred near the stock market’s historic peak, just before it began to slide amid concerns about Trump’s tariff plans and ultimately plummeted after the president unveiled the details of the new tariffs on April 2.

Disclosure records filed by Duffy with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show he sold between $75,000 and $600,000 of stock two days before Trump’s Feb. 13 announcement, and up to $50,000 more that day.

Transportation secretaries normally have little to do with tariff policy, but Duffy has presented himself as one of the intellectual forefathers of Trump’s current trade agenda. As a congressman in 2019, his last government position before Trump elevated him to his cabinet post, Duffy introduced a bill he named the “United States Reciprocal Trade Act.” The proposed legislation, which did not pass, in many ways mirrors Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan. Duffy worked on that bill with Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro. Trump’s tariffs were “the culmination of that work,” Duffy posted online, referring to his own bill in the House.

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned in the course of their official duties could violate the law. However, it’s unclear whether Duffy had any information about the timing or scale of Trump’s reciprocal tariff plans before the public did.

Trump had repeatedly promised to institute significant tariffs throughout the campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume Trump wouldn’t adopt the far-reaching levies that led to the market crash following his “Liberation Day” announcement.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a Transportation Department spokesperson said an outside manager made the trades and Duffy “had no input on the timing of the sales” — a defense that ethics experts generally consider one of the strongest against questions of trading on nonpublic information.

His stock transactions “are part of a retirement account and not managed directly by the Secretary. The account managers must follow the guidance of the ethics agreement and they have done so.”

“The Secretary strongly supports the President’s tariff policy, but he isn’t part of the administration’s decisions on tariff levels,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson dismissed the notion that knowledge of Trump’s coming tariffs could constitute insider knowledge because “President Trump has been discussing tariffs since the 1980s.”

Duffy is the second cabinet secretary to have sold stock at an opportune time.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. A government ethics agreement required Bondi to sell the shares within 90 days of her confirmation, a deadline that would have given her until early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. After the market closed that day, Trump presented his tariffs, sending the market reeling.

Following ProPublica’s story, at least two Democratic members of Congress called for investigations. Bondi has yet to answer questions about whether she knew anything about Trump’s tariff plans before the public did. The Justice Department has not responded to questions about the trades.

Disclosure forms for securities trading by government officials do not require them to state the exact amount bought or sold but instead to provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

Duffy's disclosure records show he sold 34 stocks worth between $90,000 and $650,000 on Feb. 11 and Feb. 13. Per the ethics agreement he signed to avoid conflicts of interest as head of the Transportation Department, he was required to sell off stock in seven of those companies during his first three months in office. Cabinet members are typically required to divest themselves of financial interests that intersect with their department’s oversight role, which in Duffy’s case involve U.S. roadways, aviation and the rest of the nation’s transportation network. The ethics agreement was dated Jan. 13, and Duffy was confirmed by the senate on Jan. 28, meaning he had until late April to sell. His spokesperson said he provided his account manager with the ethics agreement on Feb. 7.

The stocks he sold in the other 27 companies were not subject to the ethics agreement. Those shares were valued somewhere between $27,000 and $405,000, according to the records. Among them were Shopify, whose merchants are impacted by the tariffs, and John Deere, the agricultural machinery manufacturer that has projected hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs because of Trump’s tariffs.

Other companies Duffy sold, like gambling firm DraftKings and food delivery service DoorDash, are less directly vulnerable to tariff disruptions. But even those companies will be impacted if Americans have less disposable cash to spend. Few stocks were not hit hard by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. The S&P 500, a broadbased index, fell almost 19% in the weeks that followed Duffy’s sales and 13% specifically after Trump unveiled the details of his reciprocal tariff plan. Since Trump unexpectedly walked back much of those initial tariffs, the market has rebounded.

There’s no indication that the cash from Duffy’s sales was immediately reinvested. He appears to have held on to parts of his portfolio, including a Bitcoin fund, treasuries, S&P 500 funds and stock in Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, an American biopharma company. (Duffy also purchased some Microsoft shares, one of the stocks he’s prohibited from holding, days earlier on Feb. 7, only to sell them on Feb. 11 with the rest of his sales.)

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through their jobs could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. The 2012 law clarified that executive and legislative branch employees cannot use nonpublic government information to trade stock and requires them to promptly disclose their trades.

But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading. Current and former officials have also raised concerns that Trump’s Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission would not aggressively investigate activities by Trump or his allies.

The president’s selection of Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation was somewhat unexpected. Duffy, who came to fame when he starred in the reality show “The Real World” in the late 1990s, had last held public office in 2019 during Trump’s first term when he served as a Wisconsin congressman.

As a lawmaker, Duffy introduced the bill that would have made it easier for Trump, or any president, to levy new tariffs, a role that had long been largely reserved for Congress. The bill would have allowed the president to impose additional tariffs on imported goods if he determined that another country was applying a higher duty rate on the same goods when they were coming from America.

The bill did not pass, but Trump has essentially assumed that power by justifying new tariffs as essential to national security or in response to a national emergency. His Feb. 13 announcement called on his advisers to come up with new tariff rates on goods coming from countries around the world based on a number of restrictions he said those countries were placing on American products — not just through tariffs, but also with their exchange rates and industry subsidies.

Even the public rollout of Duffy’s bill and Trump’s tariffs were similar. Duffy released a spreadsheet showing how other countries tariffed particular goods at a higher rate than the U.S. Trump also used a spreadsheet during his rollout to show that his new tariffs were the same or lower than the trade restrictions other countries had placed on American goods.

More recently, Duffy has been a booster of Trump’s trade policies.

“LIBERATION DAY!!🇺🇸🇺🇸We’re not gonna take it anymore!💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻,” he tweeted two days after Trump unveiled his reciprocal tariffs on April 2. “This week, @POTUS took a historic step towards stopping other countries from ripping off the American worker and restoring Fair Trade. In Congress, I helped lead the US Reciprocal Trade Act with @RealPNavarro and the @WhiteHouse to expand the President’s tariff powers in his first term. I am so proud to have been able to share the culmination of that work, Liberation Day, with my family this week. Thank you at POTUS!”

One item that made the list is polyethylene terephthalate, more commonly known as PET resin, the thermoplastic used to make plastic bottles.

Why it was spared is unclear, and even people in the industry are confused about the reason for the reprieve.

But its inclusion is a win for Reyes Holdings, a Coca-Cola bottler that ranks among the largest privately held companies in the U.S. and is owned by a pair of brothers who have donated millions of dollars to Republican causes. Records show the company recently hired a lobbying firm with close ties to the Trump White House to make its case on tariffs.

Whether the company’s lobbying played any role in the exemption is unclear. Reyes Holdings and its lobbyists did not respond to questions from ProPublica. The White House also did not comment, but some industry advocates say the administration has rebuffed requests for exemptions.

The resin’s unexplained inclusion on the list exemplifies how opaque the administration’s process for crafting its tariff policy has been. Major stakeholders are in the dark about why certain products face levies and others don’t. Tariff rates have been altered without any clear explanation for the changes. Administration officials have given conflicting messages about the tariffs or declined to answer questions at all.

The lack of transparency about the process has created concerns among trade experts that politically connected firms might be winning carve-outs behind closed doors.

“It could be corruption, but it could just as easily be incompetence,” a lobbyist who works on tariff policy said of PET resin’s inclusion. “To be honest, this was such a hurried mess, I am not sure who got into the White House to talk to folks about the list.”

During the first Trump administration, there was a formal process for seeking an exemption from tariffs. Companies submitted hundreds of thousands of applications making the case for why their products should be spared. The applications were public, so the machinery of the tariff crafting process could be more closely examined. Such transparency allowed academics to subsequently analyze thousands of the applications and determine that political donors to Republicans were more likely to be granted exemptions.

In Trump’s second term, at least thus far, there has not been a formal application process for tariff carve-outs. Industry executives and lobbyists are making their case behind closed doors. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board last week called “the opacity of the process” for getting an exemption “the Beltway Swamp’s dream.”

In the executive order formalizing Trump’s new tariffs, including baseline 10% tariffs for almost all countries, exemptions were broadly defined as products in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, lumber, copper, critical minerals and energy sectors. An accompanying list detailed the specific products that would be spared.

But a ProPublica review of that list found many items that don’t fit neatly, or at all, in those broad categories, and some items that fall squarely within the categories were not spared.

The White House exclusions list, for example, included most types of asbestos, which is not generally considered a critical mineral and doesn’t seem to fit in any of the exempted categories. The cancer-causing mineral, which is not generally considered critical to national security or the U.S. economy, is still used to make chlorine, but the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency banned imports of the material last year. The Trump administration has signaled it may roll back some of those Biden-era restrictions.

A spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council, which had pushed back on the ban because it could hurt the chlorine industry, said the trade group played no role in lobbying for asbestos to get a tariff exemption and didn’t know why it was included. (Two major chlorine companies also showed no indication of lobbying on the tariffs in their disclosure forms.)

Other items that landed on the list, despite not falling into exempted categories, are far more innocuous. Among them: coral, shells and cuttlebone, a part of the cuttlefish that is used as a dietary supplement for pets.

PET resin also doesn’t fit neatly in any of the exempted categories. It’s possible the administration counted it as an energy product, experts said, because its ingredients are derived from petroleum. But other products that would have met that same low bar were not included.

“We are as surprised as anybody,” said Ralph Vasami, executive director of the PET Resin Association, a trade group for the industry. The resin, he said, has no application for the exempted categories, unless you count the packaging those products come in.

During the fourth quarter of last year, the same period when Trump won the election, records show Reyes Holdings, the Coca-Cola bottler, enlisted Ballard Partners to lobby on tariffs. During the first quarter of this year, when Trump was inaugurated, records show that Ballard began lobbying the Commerce Department, which shapes trade policy, on tariffs.

The firm has become a destination for companies looking for an in with the Trump administration. It once lobbied for Trump’s own company, the Trump Organization, and its staff has included top officials in the administration, such as Attorney General Pam Bondi and the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Brian Ballard, its founder and a prolific fundraiser for Trump, was named by Politico “the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington.” He was one of two lobbyists from the firm who lobbied on tariffs for Reyes Holdings, federal disclosure records show.

The billionaire brothers behind Reyes Holdings, Chris and Jude Reyes, also have their own political ties. While they have given to some Democratic candidates, the bulk of their political donations have gone to Republican causes, campaign finance disclosures show. And after Trump’s first election win, Chris Reyes was invited to Mar-a-Lago to meet privately with Trump.

The PET resin carve-out isn’t just a break for Reyes Holdings. It’s a boon to other firms that buy the resin to manufacture bottles and the beverage companies that use them. Earlier this year, the CEO of Coca-Cola said the company would transition to using more plastic bottles in the face of new tariffs on aluminum, a plan that might have been dashed if the thermoplastics were also hit with new tariffs. Disclosure records show the company also lobbied this year about tariffs on the Hill, but the documents don’t provide detail about which policies in particular, and the company did not respond to questions from ProPublica. (Coca-Cola has looked to make inroads with Trump, donating about $250,000 for his inauguration, and the CEO presented Trump with a personalized bottle of his favorite soda, Diet Coke.)

Another industry that appears to have done relatively well lobbying for carve-outs from the recent tariffs is agriculture. The exemption list includes various pesticide and fertilizer ingredients.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural lobby, took credit for some of those exemptions in an analysis posted on its website recently, calling exemptions for peat and potash “hard fought for by agricultural organizations such as the American Farm Bureau Federation” and “a testament to the effectiveness of farmers’ and ranchers raising their collective voice.”

There are a number of other imports that don’t neatly fall into any of the exempted categories but might if the categories were defined loosely.

One example is sucralose, the artificial sweetener. Its inclusion will largely help companies that use the product in food and beverages. But sucralose is also sometimes used in drugs to make them more palatable. It’s not clear if the White House gave it a pass under the pharmaceutical exemption or for some other reason.

Even for the items that were spared, the reprieve may just be temporary.

The broad categories exempted are largely industries that are being investigated by the administration for potential future tariffs under its authority to administer levies to protect national security.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Finerty’s colleagues told investigators the relationships were “highly inappropriate” as they could give the Air Force undue influence in Congress. “I honestly felt sick to my stomach,” one said, according to a report about the investigation, “because it just felt so sleazy.”

The Air Force inspector general’s report redacted the names of the women who worked on the Hill.

But one of the women whose relationship with Finerty was scrutinized by the inspector general was Sen. Joni Ernst, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. The Iowa Republican and combat veteran is one of the most influential voices on the Hill about the military, and she sits on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Pentagon and plays a crucial role in setting its annual budget.

Three other sources told ProPublica that around 2019 Ernst had a previous romantic relationship with a legislative affairs official for a different branch of the military, the Navy.

Ernst and the officials were not married at the time and Senate rules do not bar lawmakers from entering into romantic relationships with lobbyists or other legislative advocates. But ethics experts say such relationships can create a conflict of interest, and other lawmakers have been criticized for such behavior in the past.

A former legislative affairs official for the military told ProPublica that people in that role aren’t officially “lobbyists but for all intent and purposes that’s their job. ... From an ethics standpoint, it’s severely problematic.” A former Air Force officer who worked for Finerty said the perception in the office was that his relationship with Ernst “absolutely gave the Air Force undue influence.”

Six sources who worked for the Air Force or in Congress told ProPublica that they had heard about a relationship between Ernst and Finerty and there had been concerns about it for years. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not have permission to speak publicly or feared for their jobs. One source said that they were told about the relationship by one of the two participants. Two sources said they heard from witnesses interviewed by the inspector general that Ernst was a focus of the investigation.

A spokesperson for Ernst would not address whether the senator had any relationships with military legislative liaisons but said the lawmaker maintained her independence: “The fake news media is clearly too busy gossiping to report the real news that Senator Ernst is focused on cutting waste at the Pentagon. Her votes and work in the Senate are guided by the voices of Iowans who elected her and her constitutional duty alone. Any insinuation otherwise by tabloid ‘journalism’ is a slanderous lie — full stop.”

Finerty’s lawyer also declined to say whether the general had a romantic relationship with Ernst while he was advocating for the Air Force in Congress. “The IG report found no evidence suggesting anything remotely approaching either conflict of interest or undue influence involving General Finerty and anyone on Capitol Hill. Further, the IG report found no law, rule, policy or guidance prohibited any of General Finerty’s relationships. Any suggestion to the contrary would be defamatory.” (The inspector general report said Finerty “wrongfully engaged in inappropriate relationships with multiple individuals” in violation of the code of military justice.) In his interview with the inspector general, according to the report, Finerty defended relationships between people in his office and “members on the Hill” — a term used to describe members of Congress.

The 41-page report documenting the inspector general’s investigation of Finerty was completed in September 2023 but was shared with Congress, and then the public, earlier this year in response to records requests. (The investigation summary, posted on the Air Force’s website, was reported first by Politico, without any mention of Ernst’s involvement.)

At the time of the report’s release to Congress in early January, Ernst’s influence over the Pentagon was on full display, as she sat at the center of one of the Trump administration’s most contentious confirmation battles. Ernst had made statements suggesting she had reservations about President Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and though she had later made encouraging statements, she had refused to formally back him.

Serving in the Iowa Army National Guard during the Iraq War, Ernst is the Senate’s first female combat veteran and has pushed to reform the military’s handling of sexual assault cases. Hegseth faced scrutiny over past allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, which he denied, as well as criticism for comments he made against allowing women in combat. Then in mid-January, Ernst reversed course under pressure from Trump allies and formally endorsed Hegseth. Her backing was considered pivotal in reviving what had appeared to be a flailing nomination.

The report about Finerty is heavily redacted but provided the following details about the inspector general’s findings. Two of the five women worked for the Pentagon. They include a civilian employee who was married to another officer and an Air Force enlisted member significantly lower down the chain of command than Finerty. Finerty interacted with the three other women on Capitol Hill as part of his legislative affairs work, “mixing his professional and personal roles, thus creating the perception of a conflict of interest.” Finerty sexted two of those women in 2021. He sexted and had an “intimate relationship” with the third, though the report does not say exactly when.

The nature of his relationship with the women varied, from suggestive messages to graphic sexting and photos to physical sex, according to the report. Sources told ProPublica that the inspector general asked witnesses about Ernst, but because of the redactions in the report, it’s unclear which sections, if any, refer to the senator.

The report includes a stark example of Finerty’s legislative advocacy overlapping with his romantic relationship with one of the women on Capitol Hill.

In June 2021, Finerty texted the woman “I was distracted by you being distracted.” Then he sent her a list of “top 5 things to protect if possible,” including a particular fighter jet, radar technology and a system to improve interoperability across the military’s branches.

“What distraction?” the woman texted back. “If I was [redacted] would it be distracting?” She followed up with a series of what the inspector general report described as pornographic pictures.

Finerty told investigators that his romantic relationships with the women on Capitol Hill were proper because all participants were unmarried.

“Those weren’t Chris Finerty’s personal interest items. Those were the five things that were in the President’s Budget that we’re charged to go up there and ensure that we get across the finish line,” he said, according to the report. “I wasn’t saying hey, do me a personal favor and protect these five things. It was, these are the five things that the Air Force has in the President’s Budget that we’re trying to do that we need your help with.”

Many of Finerty’s colleagues who were also working in military legislative affairs took a more negative view. In interviews with investigators, they expressed concerns about the relationships leading to undue influence, other military branches perceiving the Air Force as getting preferential treatment, and other congressional offices worrying they were less likely to receive sensitive information.

The inspector general’s investigation found “several exchanges between Maj Gen Finerty and the women regarding legislative matters” but “no evidence of favors or exchanging of sensitive information by either party.”

Regarding one of the Hill relationships, a colleague of Finerty’s told investigators, “Was there a perception in my office that it was unethical? Yes.” The colleague reported it affected morale and people were “talking about it all the time.”

Another military legislative affairs official was more blunt, calling the relationships “totally unprofessional” because “I think it compromises the integrity of the entire Department of the Air Force.”

The inspector general concluded Finerty had violated the code of military justice, including “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” for his “inappropriate relationships” with all five women. As a result, Finerty was demoted to brigadier general. He retired from the Air Force in November.

Around the time Finerty was heading the legislative affairs office, from April 2019 to March 2023, Ernst publicly pushed for more money and championed projects for the Air Force on multiple occasions, including in at least one instance on a specific matter that Finerty was advocating for on the Hill.

In June 2021, she pushed for more Air Force funding from the Senate floor: “While the Biden budget promises a bureaucratic buildup at the IRS, his proposal is far less generous to our armed forces. The Air Force would suffer a substantial cut in its number of aircraft.”

In April 2022, she attacked then-President Joe Biden for a proposed budget that “shrinks the size of our Air Force.”

“With Putin and his cronies invading Ukraine, China testing hypersonic missiles and threatening Taiwan, Iran enriching uranium, and the Taliban back in control of Afghanistan, it’s as critical as ever that we provide for a strong national defense,” Ernst said in a statement.

Two months later, she pushed legislation to improve the Pentagon’s access to critical minerals, warning “the Air Force’s premier fighter jet, the F-22, is made with layers of titanium alloy, much of which is sourced from Russia and China.”

In November 2023, several months after Finerty left his post, she introduced a bill to allow the Pentagon to connect weapons and technology across the various branches of the government, a concept known as Joint All Domain Command and Control — which was on the list of top priorities he texted to one of the women on the Hill he was romantically involved with.

According to three sources, Ernst had an earlier romantic relationship around 2019 with an official from the Navy’s legislative affairs office. Ernst was on the armed services committee then as well. One source with knowledge of the situation said the relationship’s end created tension between Ernst’s office and the Navy legislative affairs office. Two sources said the Navy liaison was moved out of his post early. One of them said he was forced to depart his post earlier than expected because he had another romantic relationship with a Hill staffer and that Ernst was not cited by his boss when he was transferred. But the second source said senior officials were aware of the relationship with Ernst and that it played a role.

A Navy spokesperson declined to comment.

Ernst has once before been accused of being involved in a relationship that may have violated military rules. In a highly contentious divorce in 2019, her ex-husband alleged she admitted to an affair with one of her soldiers when she served as a company commander during the Iraq War. Ernst denied having an affair.

Other elected officials have drawn scrutiny for their relationships with lobbyists and others who advocate for their employers before Congress.

Former Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt married a lobbyist for tobacco giant Altria Group, but he pledged to recuse himself from any matters affecting the company. Former Pennsylvania Rep. Bill Shuster was criticized for dating an airline lobbyist while he chaired the House’s transportation committee, a relationship he said was proper because she was not lobbying his office. In 2018, the married state Senate majority leader in Iowa, which Ernst represents, resigned abruptly after video surfaced of him kissing a lobbyist for the Iowa League of Cities.

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties, said of the relationships with officials advocating before Ernst’s committee: “It kind of takes your breath away.”

The relationships, Canter said, make Ernst vulnerable to being extorted if people learned of them and could give someone undue influence over her.

“It draws into question every position she’s taken that would affect his office,” Canter said. “You’re expecting her to represent her constituents’ interests every time she supports a policy or votes. Once she has engaged in that kind of relationship, you have to call into question her impartiality.”

The military is particularly strict about romantic relationships, with rules against adultery, liaisons between employees of different rank, and various other types of relationships that could create ethical pitfalls.

One former high-ranking Pentagon official said he thought some of the rules may be antiquated and overly strict, but that a relationship between an officer handling legislative affairs and a senator created too severe a conflict.

“That seems way beyond inappropriate to me, somebody who’s there representing the U.S. military within the military chain of command with a U.S. senator on Armed Services, that makes it really bad.”

The new target, the sources said, is a database that tracks the flow of money across the government, from the Treasury to specific agencies and then to the ultimate destination of the funds.

The data in the system, known as the Central Accounting Reporting System, or CARS, is considered sensitive. Many transactions flowing to the same place, for example, can suggest a new national security priority for the U.S. government. People who work with the system have in the past been briefed that the database may be of interest to foreign intelligence agencies, said a third source who has familiarity with the system.

Musk’s affiliates are expected to arrive at Treasury offices in Parkersburg, West Virginia, next week, according to two sources, prompting concern among the staff there. The offices house a large number of staffers who work for the previously obscure Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the part of the Treasury that manages accounting and payments systems.

A spokesperson for DOGE did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Neither did a Treasury spokesperson.

CARS is intended to standardize accounting across government agencies and account for how money is moved. It’s unclear what specifically the DOGE team’s interest in the system is. When government auditors have examined the system in the past, the Treasury has pushed for them to do it in secure environments or on the Fiscal Service’s laptops.

DOGE’s earlier actions at the Treasury have become a focus of congressional scrutiny and a federal court battle in recent days. Musk’s team initially tried to halt money going to the U.S. Agency for International Development from the Treasury’s payment system.

A veteran career official within the Treasury pushed back and then retired in the face of the demands. On Friday morning, The Washington Post reported that one of the DOGE-affiliated staffers involved in that standoff, Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley tech executive, would be replacing the career official who resigned, which would give him power over the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment and accounting systems.

Federal workers unions took the matter to court, and a judge on Thursday temporarily limited Musk’s team to read-only access.

The Treasury has assured Congress that the DOGE-affiliated staffers have read-only privileges for the payment system, but Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has raised concerns that the agency may have misled lawmakers, citing reports from Wired that a DOGE staffer had “read-write” access for several days. “Treasury’s refusal to provide straight answers about DOGE’s actions, as well as its refusal to provide a briefing requested by several Senate committees only heightens my suspicions,” Wyden said in a statement on Friday.

One of the two Musk-affiliated officials probing the Treasury’s systems resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal discovered racist posts on a social media account linked to him.

The posts included “I was racist before it was cool” and “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”

It’s not clear which personnel are scheduled to make the trip to West Virginia or if the resignation will affect those plans. By Friday morning, Musk was posting on X about bringing the staffer back, and Vice President JD Vance backed the idea, saying, “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” In a press conference, Trump said he wasn’t familiar with the situation but backed Vance’s take.

Now congressional Republicans have the job of figuring out which of those cuts to propose into law. In order to pay for the cuts, they have started to eye some targets to raise money. Among them: cutting benefits for single mothers and poor people who rely on government health care.

The proposals are included in a menu of tax and spending cut options circulated this month by House Republicans. Whether or not Republicans enact any of the ideas remains to be seen. Some of the potential targets are popular tax breaks and cuts could be politically treacherous. And cutting taxes for the wealthy could risk damaging the populist image that Trump has cultivated.

For the ultrawealthy, the document floats eliminating the federal estate tax, at an estimated cost of $370 billion in revenue for the government over a decade. The tax, which charges a percentage of the value of a person’s fortune after they die, kicks in only for estates worth more than around $14 million.

Among those very few Americans who do get hit with the tax, nearly 30% of the tax is paid by the top 0.1% by income, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center think tank. (Many ultra-wealthy people already largely avoid the tax. Over the years, lawyers and accountants have devised ways to pass fortunes to heirs tax free, often by using complex trust structures, as ProPublica has previously reported.)

Another proposal aims to slash the top tax rate paid by corporations by almost a third.

Trump promised such a cut during the campaign. But Vice President JD Vance came out against it before Trump picked him as his running mate. “We’re sort of in line with the OECD right now,” he said in an interview last year, referring to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 38 wealthy developed nations. “I don’t think we need to be cutting the corporate tax rate further.”

In Trump’s first term, he brought the top corporate rate down from 35% to 21%, where it’s at now, taking the U.S. from a high rate compared to other OECD nations to about average. The proposed cut to 15% would make the United States’ rate among the lowest of such countries.

To pay for new tax cuts, the House Republicans’ proposal floats a series of potential overhauls of government programs. One major focus is possible cuts to Medicaid, the health care program for people with low incomes that is administered by the states. Medicaid expansion was a key tenet of the Affordable Care Act, passed under President Barack Obama. Many Republican governors initially chose not to take advantage of the new federal subsidies to expand the program. In the intervening years, several states reversed course, and the program has expanded the number of people enrolled in Medicaid by more than 20 million, as of last year.

The deep cuts to the program floated in the document include slashing reimbursements to the states. States would need to “raise new revenues or reduce Medicaid spending by eliminating coverage for some people, covering fewer services, and (or) cutting rates paid to physicians, hospitals, and nursing homes,” according to an analysis by KFF, a health policy organization.

Trump has been inconsistent in his position on Medicaid over the years. He sought to slash the program in his first term. But he has also made statements about protecting it over the years.

As recently as a 2023 campaign event, Trump promised that “we’re not going to play around with Medicare, Medicaid.” But it’s not clear whether the comment was a throwaway: While preserving Medicare, the program that covers health care for the elderly, has been a focus for Trump, maintaining Medicaid has not. The official GOP platform rolled out by Trump last year, for example, promised not to cut “one penny” from Medicare but was silent on Medicaid. In separate remarks during the campaign last year, Trump appeared to endorse cuts to "entitlements," after an interviewer asked about Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Other proposals would eliminate tax breaks for families with children.

Currently, parents can get a tax credit of up to $2,100 for child care expenses. The House Republican plan floats the elimination of that break. The cut is estimated to save $55 billion over a decade.

Vance, in particular, had promised economic policies that would lessen the load on parents. “It is the task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids,” he said last week. (He campaigned on a proposal to more than double the child tax credit.)

Another proposal in the list of options takes aim squarely at parents raising children on their own. The provision would eliminate the “head of household” filing status to collect almost $200 billion more in taxes over a decade from single parents and other adults caring for dependents on their own.

The “head of household” status was created in the 1950s under the rationale that single parents should have a lighter tax burden. Eliminating it would affect millions of Americans, largely women. (The after-tax pay of people with incomes between the 20th and 80th percentiles, those making between about $14,000 and $100,000, would fall by the highest percentage, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation.)

Democrats have criticized the proposals as a gift to the wealthy at the expense of the working class. “Republicans are gearing up for a class war against everyday families in America,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to questions about the specifics in the House GOP document but said in an email that “This is an active negotiation and process one that the President and his team are working productively with congress. His visit to the House Retreat [Monday] was a sign that he wants to prioritize unity and a good deal for American that achieves his campaign promises.”

A spokesperson for the House Budget Committee declined to answer specific questions but said “this is a menu of policy options for authorizing committees to consider as members navigate the reconciliation process.”

Some of the proposals would fulfill Trump’s campaign promises geared toward the working class.

The document includes a plan to eliminate income taxes (but maintain payroll taxes) on tips, at a cost of $106 billion over a decade. The proposal is one Trump touted while campaigning in Las Vegas to win support from the city’s huge contingent of service workers. Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, later pledged to do the same. Economists have criticized the idea as one that unfairly benefits one group of working-class employees over others who get paid the same but work in other industries that don’t deal in tips.

Another Trump campaign promise included in the document is ending taxes on overtime pay, at a price of $750 billion over a decade. That proposal has also been criticized by tax experts as an inefficient way to provide relief for lower-paid workers who are eligible for overtime because they’re paid hourly and perform repetitive tasks. The provision, critics say, would invite gaming and further complicate tax reporting by creating new reporting requirements about the hours a taxpayer worked.

One of the biggest-ticket proposals to raise new revenue in the House Republicans’ document would hit a tax break cherished by upper-income Americans: eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. The document estimates $1 trillion in savings over 10 years by eliminating the break. Because of a complex interplay of different features of the tax code, an estimated 60% of the value of this deduction flows to Americans making over $200,000 per year, according to the Tax Foundation.

Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction would have an uneven geographic impact: analyseshave found the tax break is more valuable to Americans in Democratic-dominated states such as California, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Last month a major shareholder of a publicly traded company took to social media to complain that people — perhaps short sellers — were spreading lies that could hurt his firm’s stock price.

“There are fake, untrue, and probably illegal rumors,” the post read. “I hereby request that the people who have set off these fake rumors or statements, and who may have done so in the past, be immediately investigated by the appropriate authorities.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t typically take its marching orders from shareholders on social media. But in this case, the poster was Donald Trump, who’s just weeks away from being inaugurated and gaining the power to appoint the head of the SEC.

When Trump takes office in January, a president will for the first time be the majority owner of a publicly traded company, Trump Media, which runs Truth Social. Former SEC officials are concerned about how Trump could try to use the agency to go after the foes of his company, which accounts for more than half his fortune. They also worry that the agency isn’t up for the job of taking on Trump Media should it run afoul of securities laws.

Cases involving public companies with aggressive lawyers are difficult “even if you don’t have conflicts of interest and concerns about pissing someone important off,” a current employee in the SEC’s enforcement division said. “I don’t think anyone would explicitly say, ‘Don’t do it,’ but they’d just be like, ‘I could do another case.’”

In Trump Media’s short history, it has had a combative relationship with the SEC, though it has never been charged with wrongdoing by the agency.

In 2022 as Trump Media was seeking to go public, which it did through a merger with an already traded company, it threatened to sue the SEC because of what it called “inexcusable obstruction” and “obvious conflicts of interest among SEC officials and clear indications of political bias.” CEO Devin Nunes posted on the platform, “NO MORE BS!” The company never sued.

The following year, the company that took Trump Media public settled fraud charges with the SEC for $18 million after the agency found it made misrepresentations in its filings. The SEC also brought insider trading charges against several people who invested in the deal.

Other, previously unreported issues have raised alarms inside the company that Trump Media could be violating securities laws by misleading investors, according to a person with knowledge of the company.

The company has long reported in its disclosure filings that it does not track basic performance numbers for Truth Social.

In its securities filings, the company says it “does not currently, and may never, collect, monitor or report certain key operating metrics used by companies in similar industries,” such as the number of active users and ad views. It has always been a puzzling claim — akin to a TV network choosing not to track ratings. Other publicly traded social media companies do track and report such fundamental measures of success for their platforms.

But according to interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica, the company does track the numbers, and the active user count is a tiny fraction of its competitors’. ProPublica reviewed images of an internal Truth Social employee dashboard from 2022 showing the company monitored the number of active users. Internal communications from this year show the practice continued.

The SEC investigates those types of discrepancies, experts said. Securities laws prohibit companies from knowingly misleading investors about information deemed to be significant to the company’s share price.

In a statement, Trump Media accused ProPublica of “willfully misrepresenting TMTG’s public filings and the content of stolen information” and relying on “unreliable individuals with known axes to grind.” The statement also alleged ProPublica was “conspiring with others to engage in market manipulations and fraud, and we will bring evidence of this malfeasance to the relevant local, state, and federal officials.” The company did not respond to a request to explain what was “misrepresented.”

While current and former SEC officials doubt the SEC will aggressively regulate Trump Media, the company is relatively small. The agency’s oversight of companies owned by Trump associates will also be fraught and could have broader market implications. Elon Musk’s Tesla, for example, is more than one hundred times the size of Trump Media. Musk has for years fought bitterly with the SEC. He settled a securities fraud case with the agency and later declared that, “Something is broken with SEC oversight.” After Musk became one of Trump’s most important financial backers, Trump appointed him to lead a commission to target government spending it deems wasteful.

Securities experts warned that if the SEC fails to aggressively regulate companies connected to the president or his allies, it could have disastrous consequences.

“If political power buys the power to defraud, that’s a problem, not just for our politics but for our markets. American companies have an easier time getting capital because there is faith in the way the American capital markets are regulated,” said Howard Fischer, an SEC trial lawyer during Trump’s first term.

Created after the stock market crash of 1929, the SEC is part of the executive branch but operates independently of the White House. Presidents appoint the agency’s chair, who leads a five-member commission that includes members of both parties. The agency’s nearly 5,000 employees report to that commission as they do the work of regulating the securities industry.

“How much impact is the president supposed to have on the SEC's day-to-day operations? The answer is none,” said Allison Herren Lee, a former Democratic SEC commissioner appointed during the first Trump administration.

The line between the SEC and the president on enforcement actions has been crossed before. President Richard Nixon’s aides pressured the SEC’s general counsel, G. Bradford Cook, to remove a reference to a financier’s illegal contribution to the Nixon campaign from an SEC complaint against the executive. Nixon then installed Cook as the SEC’s chair. But after the meetings with Nixon’s aides were revealed, Cook resigned as chair, saying “the effectiveness of the agency might be impaired” because of the perception of undue influence.

If Trump tries to make enforcement demands of the SEC, as he did in his Truth Social post calling for an investigation of short sellers, SEC officials would face a choice: either ignore the president and risk his wrath, or follow his orders and undermine their independence. Former SEC officials interviewed by ProPublica predicted a middle path, in which the agency would not seriously investigate baseless claims against the company’s foes but would claim it was doing so to satisfy him.

The co-director of the SEC’s enforcement division during Trump’s first term told ProPublica he knew of no instances of Trump getting involved in enforcement decisions during his first term.

“We didn’t have issues of political interference,” said Steven Peikin, who is now in private practice. “We investigated some significant political figures.”

The Trump-era SEC investigated former Rep. Chris Collins, a Republican Trump ally from New York, who pleaded guilty to insider trading. Trump later pardoned him. The agency also investigated former Republican North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr for insider trading after the coronavirus stock market crash. (Burr said the case was ultimately dropped.)

Still, during his first term, Trump did not shy away from asking the SEC to consider specific regulatory changes. In 2018, for example, he tweeted that after speaking with “some of the world’s top business leaders,” he had asked the agency to consider allowing companies to stop filing quarterly reports and move to twice-a-year reporting.

“This was highly unusual,” Lee, the former SEC commissioner, told ProPublica.

Trump’s SEC chair at the time, Jay Clayton, said the agency was looking into “the frequency of reporting,” before rejecting the idea months later.

Though Clayton was generally popular among the SEC’s staff, his chumminess with Trump, including multiple rounds of golf together, did raise concerns about his independence.

In 2020, Clayton was asked during a House hearing if he ever discussed SEC matters with Trump during their golf outings. “There are no conversations that I’ve had that make me in any way — in any way — uncomfortable with my independence,” he testified.

While the SEC investigates possible civil violations of securities law, it is up to the FBI and Department of Justice to pursue criminal cases. Trump’s selections to lead both those agencies in his second term have ties to his social media company: Kash Patel, the FBI pick, is on the Trump Media board. Pam Bondi, selected to be attorney general, was identified in an April filing as owning a stake in the company worth more than $4 million at current prices. It’s not clear if she still owns the shares. (Bondi did not respond to a request seeking comment.)

If federal authorities shy away from scrutinizing Trump Media, securities experts said the void could be filled by state authorities, who Trump has no authority over.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw blue state securities regulators opening investigations,” said Andrew Jennings, a law professor who teaches securities regulation at Emory University.

New York’s attorney general has already entered the fray. Letitia James’ office is examining an emergency loan provided to Trump Media before it went public from a trust connected to a bank in the Caribbean, according to records and a source with knowledge of the probe.

Last month, the Financial Times reported that Trump Media is in talks to buy a crypto trading venue called Bakkt. If that deal is consummated, it would be Trump’s second crypto venture following the September launch of a Trump-affiliated token by a company called World Liberty Financial.

Trump’s crypto investments create yet another area of potential conflict of interest with the SEC, whose current Democratic chair, Gary Gensler, led an enforcement campaign against the crypto market, which he described as rife with fraud and scams.

On Wednesday, Trump announced his nominee to chair the SEC: Paul Atkins, a Bush-era SEC commissioner who has spent the last seven years as co-chair of a crypto advocacy group.

Deregulating crypto was a theme of Trump’s campaign, with Trump telling a crypto conference over the summer: “The rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.”

The firm’s use of workers in Mexico was confirmed by a spokesperson for Trump Media, which operates the Truth Social platform. The workers were hired through another entity to code and perform other technical duties, according to a person with knowledge of Trump Media. The reliance on foreign labor was met with outrage among the company's own staff, who accused its leadership of betraying their “America First” ideals, the person said.

The outsourcing to Mexico helped prompt a recent whistleblower letter from staff to Trump Media’s board that has been roiling the company.

That complaint, reported by ProPublica last month, calls for the board to fire CEO Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman. The letter alleges he has “severely” mismanaged the company. It also asserts the company is hiring “America Last” — with Nunes imposing a directive to hire only foreign contractors at the expense of “American workers who are deeply committed to our mission.”

“This approach not only contradicts the America First principles we stand for but also raises concerns about the quality, dedication, and alignment of our workforce with our core values,” the complaint reads.

A Trump Media spokesperson said the company uses “two individual workers” in Mexico. “Presenting the fact that [Trump Media] works with precisely two specialist contractors in Mexico as some sort of sensational scandal is just the latest in a long line of defamatory conspiracy theories invented by the serial fabricators at ProPublica,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson declined to answer other questions about the company’s Mexican contractors, including how much they’ve been paid, how many have been used over time and how their hiring squares with Trump’s promises to punish firms that send jobs outside of the U.S. The Trump campaign did not respond to questions.

For a company of its prominence, Trump Media has a tiny permanent staff, employing just a few dozen people as of the end of last year, only a portion of whom work on the Truth Social technology.

Trump Media’s hiring of Mexican coders also prompted frustration within the staff, the person with knowledge of the company said, because they were perceived by staff to not have the technical expertise to do the work.

On its homepage, Truth Social bills itself as “Proudly made in the United States of America. 🇺🇸”

Both as president and in his campaign for a second term, Trump has criticized companies that send jobs abroad, particularly to Mexico. If elected, he has pledged to “stop outsourcing” and “punish” companies that send jobs abroad.

For example, Trump recently threatened agricultural machinery giant John Deere with tariffs if it went through with plans to move some of its manufacturing to Mexico.

“I’m just notifying John Deere right now, if you do that, we’re putting a 200 percent tariff on everything you want to sell into the United States,” Trump said.

He has made a similar threat against automakers building cars in Mexico, demanding they hire American workers and manufacture domestically.

“I'm not going to let them build a factory right across the border,” Trump promised, “and sell millions of cars into the United States and destroy Detroit further."

Trump owns nearly 60% of the social media company, a stake worth around $3.5 billion at the stock’s Friday closing price — more than half of the former president’s net worth.

The results of the election are widely seen as a major factor in the future value of the company. As the Nov. 5 election draws closer, Trump Media’s stock price has fluctuated wildly even as little or nothing has changed in the company’s actual business, which generates scant revenue. The stock closed Friday down 40% from its recent peak on Tuesday. Despite that drop, it has still nearly doubled since the beginning of October.

One Trump Media board member, Eric Swider, offered a defense of relying on foreign labor in a statement to ProPublica from his lawyer.

“President Trump maintains an America First policy, which includes prioritizing American workers. Trump Media, however, is a global multi-media company. For a global multi-media company to utilize subcontractors, which in turn may utilize coders located in a foreign country, is a practice common to the industry,” the statement said. “Such global multi-media companies like Trump Media would have no right to control the employment decisions of its subcontractors, which may employ workers in a multitude of different countries in addition to the United States.”

Swider, a businessman based in Puerto Rico, serves on the board alongside better known figures such as Donald Trump Jr. and Linda McMahon, the former Trump cabinet member who is now co-chair of his transition team.

The outsourcing to Mexico is not the only instance of Trump Media relying on foreign workers. ProPublica previously reported that the company used a foreign firm to source labor in the Balkans.

Nunes, for his part, is quoted in a new book about Truth Social, “Disappearing the President,” boasting about his ability to keep costs down at Trump Media, though he didn’t mention outsourcing.

“Nobody grew as fast as we did. I don't think there's any other example even close to us out there, especially with as little money as we spent,” Nunes said. “Don't forget that. We built this for a fraction of what these other companies were built for.”

Former President Donald Trump’s media company has forced out executives in recent days after internal allegations that its CEO, former Rep. Devin Nunes, is mismanaging the company, according to interviews and records of communications among former employees.

Several people involved with Trump Media believe the ousters are retaliation following what they describe as an anonymous “whistleblower” complaint regarding Nunes that went to the company’s board of directors.

The chief operating officer and chief product officer have left the company, along with at least two lower-level staffers, according to interviews, social media posts and communications between former staffers reviewed by ProPublica. The company, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, disclosed the departure of the chief operating officer in a securities filing Thursday afternoon.

ProPublica has not seen the whistleblower complaint. But several people with knowledge of the company said the concerns revolve around alleged mismanagement by Nunes. One person said they include allegations of misuse of funds, hiring of foreign contractors and interfering with product development.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Trump Media did not answer specific questions but said that ProPublica’s inquiry to the company “utterly fabricates implications of improper and even illegal conduct that have no basis in reality.”

“This story is the fifth consecutive piece in an increasingly absurd campaign by ProPublica, likely at the behest of political interest groups, to damage TMTG based on false and defamatory allegations and vague innuendo,” the statement said, adding that “TMTG strictly adheres to all laws and applicable regulations.”

Trump Media’s board comprises a set of powerful figures in Trump’s world, including his son Donald Trump Jr., former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the businesswoman Linda McMahon, a major donor and current co-chair of Trump’s transition planning committee.

Nunes was named CEO of the company in 2021, with Trump hailing him as “a fighter and a leader” who “will make an excellent CEO.” As a member of Congress, Nunes was known as one of Trump’s staunchest loyalists.

After the internal allegations about Nunes were made at Trump Media, the company enlisted a lawyer to investigate and interview staffers, according to a person with knowledge of the company.

Then, last week, some employees who were interviewed by the lawyer were notified they were being pushed out, the person said. The employees being pushed out include a human relations director and a product designer, along with Chief Operating Officer Andrew Northwall and Chief Product Officer Sandro De Moraes. The person with knowledge of the company said Trump Media asked the employees to sign an agreement pledging not to make public claims of wrongdoing against the company in exchange for severance.

On Thursday afternoon, Northwall posted on Truth Social announcing he had “decided to resign from my role at Trump Media,” adding that he was “incredibly grateful” to Trump and Nunes “for this opportunity.”

“As I step back, I look forward to focusing more on my family and returning to my entrepreneurial journey,” the statement said.

De Moraes now identifies himself on his Truth Social bio as the “Former Chief Product Officer” of the company.

Some word of the departures became public earlier this week when former Trump Media employee Alex Gleason said in a social media post that “Truth Social in shambles. Many more people fired.”

Trump personally owns nearly 60% of the company. That stake, even after a recent decline in the company’s stock price, is worth nearly $2 billion on paper, a significant chunk of Trump’s fortune. He said last month he was not planning to sell his shares. What role Trump plays, if any, in the day-to-day operations of the company is not clear.

Since it launched in 2021, the company has become a speculation-fueled meme stock, but its actual business has generated virtually no revenue and Truth Social has not emerged as a serious competitor to the major social media platforms.

Among Nunes’ moves as CEO, as ProPublica has reported, was inking a large streaming TV deal with several obscure firms, including one controlled by a major political donor. He also traveled to the Balkans over the summer and met with the prime minister of North Macedonia, a trip whose purpose was never publicly explained by the company.

Trump Media has a formal whistleblower policy, adopted when the company went public in March, that encourages employees to report illegal activity and other “business conduct that damages the Company’s good name” and business interests.