Skip to main content
Cloudy icon
31ยบ

Trump fills his government with billionaires after running on a working-class message

1 / 3

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Elon Musk reacts as President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a rally ahead of the 60th Presidential Inauguration, Sunday, Jan. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

ATLANTA โ€“ President Donald Trumpโ€™s brash populism has always involved incongruence: the billionaire businessman-politician stirring the passions of millions who, regardless of the U.S. economyโ€™s trajectory, could never afford to live in his Manhattan skyscraper or visit his club in south Florida.

His second White House is looking a lot like the inside of Mar-a-Lago, with extremely wealthy Americans taking key roles in his Republican administration.

Recommended Videos



The worldโ€™s richest man, Elon Musk, is overseeing a new Department of Government Efficiency. Billionaires or mega-millionaires are lined up to run the treasury, commerce, interior and education departments, NASA and the Small Business Administration, and fill key foreign posts.

โ€œHeโ€™s bringing in folks who have had great success in the private sector,โ€ said Debbie Dooley, an early 2015 Trump supporter and onetime national organizer in the anti-establishment Tea Party movement. โ€œIf you need to have brain surgery, you want the proven brain surgeons.โ€

Others raise concerns about conflicts of interest at odds with Trumpโ€™s pledge to fight for โ€œforgotten men and womenโ€ in a country where the median household net worth is about $193,000 and median annual household income is about $81,000.

โ€œItโ€™s hard to conceive how the wealthiest set of Cabinet nominees and White House appointments in history will understand what average working people are going through,โ€ said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who served under President Bill Clinton and has warned for decades about the nationโ€™s widening wealth and wage gaps.

Countered Dooley: โ€œTrump sets the agenda. If they wonโ€™t enact his policies, then they will hear him say what we hear on โ€˜The Apprenticeโ€™ all the time: โ€˜Youโ€™re fired!โ€™โ€

Here is a closer look at some of Trumpโ€™s picks, their net worth according to Forbes and Yahoo Finance, and what the choices could mean:

Elon Musk

Musk (net worth estimated above $400 billion) is chairing the new Department of Government Efficiency, which is a special commission charged with slashing federal spending. The extensive ties his businesses have to the government have raised questions about Musk's potential conflicts in the role.

Linda McMahon

McMahon was picked to be Trump's secretary of education. She is the wife of Vince McMahon, who is worth at least $3 billion.

The former WWE wrestling executive will lead an agency that many conservatives have called for abolishing altogether. While thatโ€™s a heavy lift politically, McMahon and Trump have endorsed an expansion of โ€œschool choice,โ€ programs that steer taxpayer money to private school tuition. She also could be in charge of implementing Trumpโ€™s proposals to withhold federal money from public schools โ€” K-12 and higher education โ€” that do not meet White House demands to modify or scrap diversity programs.

Doug Burgum

The former North Dakota governor made his money as a software entrepreneur, selling his business to Microsoft for more than $1 billion in 2001. The latest federal financial disclosures show his personal holdings to include assets with ranges that exceed $100 million but do not provide a precise value of his net worth. Disclosure forms also do not require him to include certain trusts if Burgum himself is not the beneficiary. Burgum impressed Trump during his own failed bid for the GOPโ€™s 2024 presidential nomination. As interior secretary, Burgum will be charged with implementing Trumpโ€™s โ€œDrill, baby, drillโ€ promise โ€” making it even easier for energy companies to tap fossil fuel resources, including from public lands.

Scott Bessent

Forbes has not yet identified Bessent as a billionaire, but the veteran hedge fund manager confirmed Monday as treasury secretary certainly is worth many hundreds of millions. At Treasury, he will play key roles in selling and implementing a number of Trumpโ€™s signature policies: reinstating the 2017 tax cuts tilted to corporations and wealthy individuals, imposing tariffs on many imports and cutting taxes on overtime wages, Social Security benefits and tip income.

Reich, the former labor secretary, noted that Bessent and his fellow wealthy Cabinet designees stand to benefit personally from Trumpโ€™s tax ideas. Trump tax policies, which helped widen the deficit in Trumpโ€™s first term, are juxtaposed with Bessentโ€™s warnings about the dangers of rising U.S. debt and the cost of annual interest payments to the governmentโ€™s bond holders.

Howard Lutnick

An apparent runner-up to head Treasury, Lutnick (estimated net worth $1.5 billion) has been nominated to be secretary of commerce. Lutnick, who made his fortune as a financial services executive, is still slated for a high-profile post that will put him at the center of Trumpโ€™s promised trade wars with China and other nations, including Mexico and Canada. Commerce also oversees several agencies, including the Census Bureau, whose calculations are key to determining the funding distributions of programs across the federal government.

Kelly Loeffler

The Georgia businesswoman named to lead the Small Business Administration was the wealthiest member of the Senate during her brief stay on Capitol Hill. Loeffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, the publicly traded firm that owns the New York Stock Exchange. Thatโ€™s not the center of commerce for the SBAโ€™s usual clientele. The agency was founded in 1953 and describes itself as โ€œthe only cabinet-level federal agency fully dedicated to small businessโ€ by providing โ€œcounseling, capital, and contracting expertise as the nationโ€™s only go-to resource and voice for small businesses.โ€

As a senator, Loeffler faced ethics complaints over alleged insider trading tied to stock trades she and her husband made as members of Congress first started receiving briefings related to the coronavirus pandemic. The trades occurred weeks before the pandemic caused markets to plummet. Justice Department and Senate inquiries later found no wrongdoing on Loefflerโ€™s part.

Jared Isaacman

Isaacman, another financial services billionaire, was the first wealthy individual to take a space walk through Muskโ€™s company, SpaceX. This choice, as much as any, illustrates Trumpโ€™s lean to the wealthy private sector, given that billionaires like Musk and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos are now competing in a space sector that was once the province of the federal government and the agency that Isaacman would lead as NASA administrator.

__

An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that Doug Burgum has an estimated net worth of $1.1 billion. The latest federal financial disclosures show his personal holdings to include assets with ranges that exceed $100 million but do not provide a precise value of his net worth.