In the past week, Donald Trump announced that he would buy a Tesla and advertised the company’s vehicles at an event that turned the White House lawn into a showroom benefitting his ally, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He also said that vandalizing Tesla cars — as some demonstrators have done to protest Musk — will be labeled an act of “domestic terrorism.”
It’s the latest and perhaps most egregious example of the conflicts of interest that have ensnared both Trump and Musk, who is leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a role that has given the world’s richest man the ability to target and gut any government agency that draws his ire.
This isn’t anything new. Trump’s first term was riddled with unprecedented conflicts of interest. Yet this time around, Trump came into office with even more business entanglements and ways to use the presidency to enrich himself. His social media company, Truth Social, is now a publicly traded company, giving anyone the ability to become a shareholder in the president’s business. He and his family members have launched crypto coins. And Trump also has a new set of merchandise licensing deals.
But when it comes to just how unprecedented the conflicts of interest are in this administration, the Tesla incident shows that Musk is the new elephant in the room. The businessman, who became one of the president’s closest advisers after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help Trump win, is now directly influencing agencies tasked with regulating his own companies. And of course other Trump appointees and nominees — from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — are not free from conflicts of interest either.
At this point, the public seems resigned to the fact that people in power also have massive incentives to enrich themselves. But in truth, there are people and processes that are supposed to protect us from this kind of abuse. What are they, how have they broken down, and how can we get them to work?
How the government polices itself
A conflict of interest arises when an official’s personal interests can cloud their judgement when making decisions on behalf of the public. When foreign officials, for example, spend money at Trump’s businesses, they create a conflict of interest for the president because he materially benefits from his relationship with them. And while some conflicts of interest are inevitable and not inherently corrupt, they do increase the risk of corruption, where officials intentionally advance their own personal interests instead of national ones.
Every branch of government has ethics standards and conflict of interest rules. Though as the ethics scandals with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have shown, they’re not always enforced.
In the executive branch, conflicts of interest are determined by statutes that apply to all federal employees — like the law prohibiting someone from working on matters where they have a financial interest — and ethics rules that are set up by the White House.
One major limitation, though, is that these conflict of interest laws do not apply to the president or vice president, which is why Trump is allowed to maintain all of his businesses while serving in the White House.
As for Musk, there’s a reason he hasn’t been subject to the same ethics standards as most other government employees. “The administration has taken pretty significant steps to insulate Mr. Musk from accountability,” said Donald Sherman, the executive director and chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “So they made him a special government employee instead of a permanent employee, so he’s working for the federal government while also maintaining his day job.”
The administration has pointed to that special status — usually given to short-term advisers who sit on temporary advisory committees or task forces — as a reason why Musk doesn’t have to make his financial disclosure form public, limiting scrutiny into his businesses’ entanglements. (Past administrations have also dubiously granted people special government employee status, as was the case when Huma Abedin worked as an aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while maintaining an outside consulting job.)
So who is responsible for actually enforcing existing conflict of interest rules where they can be applied?
“Primarily that has been — within the executive branch — the Office of Government Ethics,” said Eric Petry, who serves as counsel in the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program. “There’s also a robust system of inspectors general, who are supposed to expose fraud and waste and conflicts.”
The Office of Government Ethics (OGE) was formed after the Watergate scandal. Before then, conflict of interest cases were mostly handled through criminal investigations and proceedings, but OGE was established to help prevent conflicts of interest from arising in the first place. Tasked with scrutinizing the president’s political appointees, the office reviews their financial disclosures, identifies areas where conflicts of interest might arise, and proposes ethics agreements to address those conflicts, including by requiring appointees to sell assets. OGE also maintains a database of officials’ disclosures, which are generally available to the public.
Inspectors general also play an important role. They are an independent watchdog within a given agency and conduct audits and investigations to ensure that the agency and its employees are complying with the law and to prevent fraud and abuse. While their investigations usually come in the form of a public report, inspectors general can also make referrals to the Department of Justice, where criminal violations can be prosecuted.
“But,” as Petry notes, “you’ve seen the Trump administration has really been putting those systems under stress or just outright ignoring them.”
Indeed, Trump has engaged in a full-on assault on these watchdogs, firing the director of OGE as well as at least 17 inspectors general across various federal agencies. Trump’s moves also underscore the potential conflicts of interest at play. At least one of the inspectors general he fired was overseeing an investigation into one of Musk’s companies. To put it mildly, these firings — which are potentially unlawful — are a major setback for the executive branch’s ability to police itself.
Obviously, that’s by design. From day one, Trump has shown little interest in promoting ethical conduct. One of his first executive orders, for example, rescinded Biden-era ethics rules that prohibited employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists. To be sure, while other administrations haven’t exactly been squeaky clean, the way the Trump administration has handled ethics concerns is a departure from its predecessors.
“Unfortunately within the executive branch, some of the tools that we typically look to to police conflicts are not going to be effective,” Petry said. “So that means we look to the other branches of government.”
Congress and the courts need to step up
This administration’s flagrant disregard for ethics rules underscores that the regulations we already have are clearly not enough. “It’s a real problem that federal conflicts-of-interest laws don’t apply to the president and vice president,” Petry said. “That’s something that Congress can and should change. There are problems here that are sort of systemic that require reform.” After Trump left office in 2021, there were some efforts to bolster ethics standards and oversight, and ensure that the president and vice president are no longer exempt from conflict of interest rules. But those efforts largely failed.
Still, the different branches of government have to make an active effort to hold each other accountable. Since Trump has undermined the ability of the executive branch to hold itself accountable, the Congress and the courts have to be more vigilant.
It might seem like it’s expecting too much of a Republican-controlled Congress to investigate potential conflicts of interests, but that’s the legislative branch’s job. It’s also not unheard of. During Trump’s first term, Republican lawmakers oversaw inquiries into the president’s appointees. Former US Rep. Jason Chaffetz, of Utah, for example, called out Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, for potentially violating the law for not properly disclosing payments from foreign governments. (Flynn pleaded guilty for lying to law enforcement, but the Department of Justice eventually dropped its case against him and Trump granted him a pardon in 2020.)
Where Congress falls short, the courts can step in. Trump’s firing of the inspectors general, for example, is improper because he neither gave Congress a 30-day notice, as required by law, nor provided a substantive reason for the inspectors general dismissals. So some of those inspectors general have filed a lawsuit against Trump, saying their firing was “contrary to the rule of law.”
“Unfortunately this moment of chaos could be really painful for a lot of people, but hopefully it will generate the backlash and public momentum for changing the system that we saw following the Gilded Age, following Watergate, following other periods of crisis and constitutional uncertainty,” Petry said.
That’s why the last line of defense against the conflicts of interest plaguing the Trump administration is important. And that is the role of the press and government watchdog groups.
Trump has been able to evade accountability in part because he is more immune to public shaming than other public officials. His corruption has always been brazen and often out in the open. As a result, many people seem desensitized to this kind of abuse of presidential power.
But while public shaming might not work as effectively on Trump, it can pressure other officials and institutions to take action. Even when there aren’t specific remedies to Trump’s or Musk’s conflicts of interest, shedding light on them for the public to see is an important accountability mechanism because people can demand more of their representatives in government and put pressure on the administration. So the public shouldn’t be resigned to the idea that ethics rules are somehow moot under Trump.
After all, that’s who lawmakers will have to answer to come election time. And it’s likely that voters will have some questions about who this administration is really serving.
“You don’t need to be an ethics expert,” Sherman, of CREW, said, “to have significant questions about how this administration is operating and whether or not conduct rises to the level of a violation of federal or criminal law.”
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