The Foxes and the Henhouse: Financial Conflicts in the Trump Administration

There is a government form called the SF-278. It runs to several pages, is printed in a font that discourages casual reading, and asks senior federal officials to list their financial interests in broad, forgiving ranges. Not exact amounts. Ranges. An official might own between one thousand and fifteen thousand dollars of something, or between one million and five million. The form does not insist on precision. It asks only for a general sketch, a rough silhouette of where power and money overlap in the life of a public servant.

Every year, these forms are filed. Every year, they become public records. Every year, almost no one reads them.

This is the system. Not a conspiracy. Not a cover-up. Just paperwork in a democracy that moves faster than paperwork can follow.

The Form That Holds the Republic Together

The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 was born from Watergate, the way most American reform is born: from scandal, in haste, with the best intentions and a design flaw that would take decades to become visible. The law required senior officials in all three branches of government to disclose their financial holdings publicly. The idea was simple and, at the time, almost radical: if the public can see what you own, the public can judge whether your decisions serve the country or your portfolio.

The Office of Government Ethics came into existence as part of this same wave of reform. Originally tucked within the Office of Personnel Management, it became an independent agency in 1989, staffed with about seventy-five people whose job it is to oversee the financial entanglements of the entire executive branch. Seventy-five people. For the entire executive branch of the United States government.

The SF-278 is their primary tool. It asks officials to disclose assets, income from outside sources, liabilities, positions held, and agreements or arrangements with former employers. But the ranges are wide enough to drive a trading desk through. An entry reading "$1,001 - $15,000" tells you that an official has a financial interest. It does not tell you whether that interest is actively traded, whether it was purchased the week before a policy decision, or whether it grew tenfold during the official's tenure.

Is this transparency? It depends on what you think transparency means.

Who Watches the Watchers

The Office of Government Ethics can review financial disclosures. It can advise officials on compliance. It can issue guidance and publish letters of concern. What it cannot do is subpoena, fine, or prosecute. If an official refuses to comply with an ethics recommendation, OGE's recourse is to refer the matter to the Department of Justice, which then decides whether to act. The Department of Justice, which serves at the pleasure of the president whose appointees OGE is meant to oversee.

The structural problem is not subtle. It is there in the organizational chart, visible to anyone who looks: the ethics watchdog depends, at every crucial juncture, on the cooperation of the people it watches.

Walter Shaub learned this during Trump's first term. As OGE director, Shaub pressed publicly for the incoming president to divest from his business holdings or establish a qualified blind trust. Trump declined both options, instead placing his assets in a revocable trust managed by his adult sons, an arrangement that kept him informed of his holdings and their performance. Shaub argued that this fell short of the standards established for previous presidents. He was technically correct. He was also, in practical terms, powerless. He resigned in July 2017, six months into the term, citing the difficulty of doing his job under the circumstances.

What happened afterward tells you something about the architecture of American ethics enforcement. OGE continued to operate. The forms continued to be filed. The system absorbed the disruption and carried on, which is another way of saying that the system functioned exactly as designed: with enough flexibility to accommodate the very conflicts it was created to prevent.

The Waiver Factory

There is a provision in federal ethics law, 18 U.S.C. Section 208, that prohibits executive branch officials from participating in government matters that affect their personal financial interests. The prohibition is real. The exception is also real. An official can receive a waiver, signed by the appropriate authority, allowing participation despite the conflict. The waiver is supposed to be a narrow tool for rare circumstances where an official's expertise is so essential that recusal would harm the public interest more than participation.

In practice, waivers have become something closer to routine. During Trump's first term, the administration issued a significant number of ethics waivers in its opening year, many of them to former lobbyists and industry executives appointed to positions overseeing the industries they had recently represented. Executive Order 13770, signed in January 2017, established a new ethics pledge for executive branch appointees but also codified the waiver mechanism. The administration also stopped publicly disclosing all waivers and eliminated the requirement for OGE to publish an annual compliance report, making the full scope of the practice harder to track.

The Obama administration used waivers too, through its own executive order, EO 13490. The comparison between administrations is complicated by differences in how waivers were counted, published, and defined. But the structural point remains regardless of which party holds power: the system includes, by design, a mechanism for neutralizing its own restrictions.

What does it mean when the exception is built into the rule from the start? Perhaps it means the rule was never really a rule. Perhaps it was always a suggestion, offered with the understanding that important people would need to decline it.

The Blind Trust That Sees Everything

Americans have a phrase for the gold standard of conflict avoidance: the blind trust. Put your assets in, appoint an independent trustee, walk away, and serve the public free from financial temptation. It sounds clean. It sounds like the system works.

The reality is more textured. A qualified blind trust, under OGE rules, requires an independent trustee approved by the ethics office. The official must have no communication with the trustee about the trust's holdings or transactions. The initial assets must be diversified or liquidated into diversified holdings, which means selling concentrated positions, sometimes at unfavorable prices, sometimes triggering significant tax events.

The result: very few officials actually establish qualified blind trusts. The process is expensive, slow, and financially punishing in ways that disproportionately affect those whose wealth is tied up in a single company or sector. Rex Tillerson, when he became Secretary of State in 2017, received a roughly $180 million ethics-compliant separation package from ExxonMobil to sever his ties to the company. This was treated as a model of compliance. It also illustrated the scale of the financial relationship that needed severing: the former CEO of the world's largest publicly traded oil company was now making American foreign policy toward oil-producing nations.

Most officials take a simpler path. They recuse themselves from specific matters where conflicts arise, or they divest particular holdings, or they move assets into diversified index funds, which do not require a blind trust. The system accepts this. The forms record it. And the distinction between owning individual oil company stocks and owning a diversified fund that holds those same stocks is, from the market's perspective, a difference without much meaning if you are the person who sets the policy that moves the entire sector.

Energy and the Inner Circle

Consider the structural picture of an administration that has declared energy dominance a central policy priority. Chris Wright, confirmed as Secretary of Energy in 2025, founded Liberty Oilfield Services in 2011, later renamed Liberty Energy, a company that provides hydraulic fracturing services. He built his career in the oil and gas sector. His expertise is precisely why he was chosen. His financial history is precisely why the ethics system exists.

Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, arrived from a career in technology and business. He invested in Great Plains Software in 1983, took over its leadership, grew it into a company with $300 million in annual sales, and sold it to Microsoft for $1.1 billion in 2001. He then entered politics as governor of North Dakota, a state whose economy is inseparable from oil extraction. The Interior Department oversees federal lands where drilling permits are granted or denied.

This is not unique to the Trump administration. Every modern administration has populated its energy and economic positions with people from the industries those positions regulate. The argument is reasonable: who better to manage energy policy than someone who understands the energy industry? The counter-argument is equally reasonable: who is more likely to make decisions that benefit the energy industry than someone whose wealth, relationships, and professional identity are rooted in it?

The ethics system's answer to this tension is procedural. File the form. Get the waiver or the recusal letter. Attend the briefing but leave the room when your former company comes up. The system trusts that procedure can contain the conflict. Whether that trust is warranted is a different question, one the system itself is not designed to answer.

What the Market Knew Before You Did

On March 24, 2026, someone purchased approximately 6,200 crude oil futures contracts in the minutes before a presidential social media post signaled a shift in Iran policy and sent prices dropping. The trades, the post, the price movement: all of this unfolded in a window so narrow that coincidence strains credulity.

Whether anyone in the current administration traded on advance knowledge of that post is a question for investigators. But the structural observation does not require an investigation. Senior officials with energy-sector financial backgrounds have routine access to policy discussions that move commodity markets. A presidential decision on Iran sanctions, a shift in drilling permits, a diplomatic signal to OPEC nations: these are the kinds of decisions that can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to anyone positioned correctly in the futures market.

The STOCK Act, passed in 2012 after a 60 Minutes investigation embarrassed Congress, was designed to clarify that members of Congress and their staff could not trade on material nonpublic information gained through their official duties. The law also extended this prohibition to commodity markets, adding provisions to the Commodity Exchange Act that explicitly bar federal employees from trading futures on nonpublic information acquired through their positions. But the law was a beginning, not a solution. Its online disclosure provisions were quietly scaled back in 2013 with almost no public debate. And while the statutory prohibition exists on paper, proving that a government official traded on insider knowledge in commodity markets remains a legal challenge with little enforcement precedent. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has anti-manipulation authority under the Dodd-Frank Act, but no case has yet tested the full reach of these provisions in the context of executive branch officials and oil futures.

The gap between the law on the books and the law in practice is not a secret. Legal scholars have written about it. Regulators are aware of it. It persists because closing it would require the same officials who benefit from it to invest in enforcement against their own interests.

Guardrails Built for a Different Speed

The Ethics in Government Act was written in 1978, when markets closed at the end of the business day and a presidential statement was a press conference scheduled hours in advance. The STOCK Act was written in 2012, when Twitter was still primarily a place for sharing opinions about television shows. Neither law anticipated a world in which a presidential social media post at 7:04 in the morning could move global commodity markets before most Americans have finished their coffee.

Commodity markets now trade nearly twenty-three hours a day, across time zones, with algorithms that parse text in milliseconds. The disclosure system operates on an annual cycle. An official files a form. Months later, someone might read it. By then, the trades have settled, the profits have been realized, and the connection between a policy decision and a market position has been buried under layers of time and complexity.

This temporal mismatch is not a failure of implementation. It is a failure of imagination. The designers of the ethics system could not have foreseen that a president would communicate major policy shifts through a social media platform, or that the gap between a decision and its public announcement could be measured in minutes rather than days. But the failure to update the system in the decades since is not a failure of imagination. It is a choice.

No federal agency currently has both the mandate and the capacity to monitor executive branch officials' real-time trading activity across equity, commodity, and derivative markets simultaneously. The SEC watches securities. The CFTC watches commodities. OGE watches disclosures. Nobody watches the space between them, the seams where conflicts hide and accountability dissolves.

A Question That Will Not Be Asked

Here is the structural problem, reduced to its simplest form: the people who would need to reform the system are the people who benefit from its current design.

Congress could strengthen the STOCK Act's commodity trading provisions and fund their enforcement. It has not. The president could issue an executive order requiring real-time trade disclosure for senior appointees. No president has. OGE could be given subpoena power and an independent enforcement mechanism. The proposal has been made and ignored. Each of these reforms exists on paper, in think-tank reports and law review articles and campaign speeches that are forgotten the morning after election night.

The foxes did not break into the henhouse. They were invited in, given a tour, handed a waiver, and asked to sign a form promising they would not eat the chickens. The form is filed annually. The chickens, one assumes, sleep soundly.

But what if the problem is not the foxes? What if the problem is that we built a henhouse with a door that locks from the inside, handed the key to whoever happened to be standing nearby, and called it governance? What if the system is not broken but functioning exactly as it was designed: flexible enough to accommodate power, rigid enough to reassure the public, and porous enough to be useless when it matters most?

These are not questions anyone in a position to answer them has an incentive to ask.