Trump’s ultra-rich cabinet: How rich is too rich for public office?

(Edited and refined by Candice Chan, with the assistance of AI translation.)

An annual financial disclosure report on senior government officials released by the US Office of Government Ethics on 30 June showed that US President Donald Trump earned more than US$2.2 billion last year — more than three times what he made in 2024, when he was out of office.

In mid-August, the US consumer advocacy group Public Citizen also published a report finding that most officials directly appointed by Trump in his second term were extremely wealthy. At least 57 had household assets worth more than US$100 million, including 17 ambassadors and 40 other senior officials. This is over four times the number of similarly wealthy appointees under the previous three presidents combined.

Taken together, the two reports offer a striking picture of the wealth at the highest levels of the Trump administration. Unsurprisingly, the Trump family remains among the super-rich. Eight of the 23 Cabinet secretaries are worth more than US$100 million. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Education Secretary Linda McMahon are each worth more than US$3 billion, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has assets exceeding US$500 million.

There is, however, an important distinction between the two reports. Public Citizen’s report highlights how wealthy these individuals already were before entering public service, while the Office of Government Ethics report shows that they have grown even richer since taking office. What the reports have in common is equally clear: they point to the extraordinary concentration of wealth among the top ranks of American political leadership. Precise comparisons across a wider pool of officials and over a longer period are still lacking, but the findings are already striking enough to command considerable attention in the US and beyond.

Power and wealth

The immediate focus, of course, is on money. The pursuit of wealth is a perfectly understandable aspiration for many people. But when government officials — particularly those in senior positions — are involved, it somehow becomes less straightforward.

Public officials are, after all, generally expected to serve the public interest, making the pursuit of personal or family gain harder to accept. This is somewhat reminiscent of the ancient Chinese legend of Yu the Great: his achievement in taming the floods in China’s heartland is made all the more admirable by the tale of how he passed by his home three times over 13 years of flooding, without going in. Had he repeatedly stopped work to go home and spend time with his family, it would hardly have fitted the image that history has bestowed upon him.

Yet, objectively speaking, public service is also a profession. Government officials have every right to own property, enjoy the fruits of their labour and provide their families with a decent standard of living. The crucial point is that such wealth should be acquired openly, transparently, lawfully and reasonably, and should be able to withstand scrutiny from the people they serve. In this sense, the fact that the US publicly discloses detailed information about the finances of its senior officials is commendable. It gives society a clear view of the financial circumstances of those who wield public power, while making undisclosed assets potentially a serious legal liability.

However, much more needs to be done. Are the assets that officials disclose — and any changes in their wealth — connected in any way to the public powers they exercise? If so, what is the nature of that connection, and how did it arise? These are among the many questions that still need to be examined. The two reports cited above are nowhere near sufficient to provide the answers.

An age-old and much-debated question

Setting aside any illegal connection between an official’s personal wealth and the power they hold, the real question is this: under a lawful system, are rich people or poor people better placed to serve the public?

There are plausible arguments on both sides, and each can be used to challenge the other. The case for wealthy officials is that, because they have less need to worry about their own financial interests, they may be better able to devote themselves to the public good. Poorer officials, by contrast, might feel a more pressing desire to accumulate wealth of their own, potentially at the expense of the public interest.

The argument for poorer officials runs in the opposite direction. Coming from less privileged circumstances may make them better able to empathise with ordinary people and more inclined to use the powers entrusted to them to serve the public. Wealthy officials, meanwhile, may be aloof and self-important, detached from the concerns of ordinary people and therefore less capable of genuinely serving their interests.

The relationship between political office and wealth is one of the oldest and most contentious questions in human history. The tension between the notions that “holding office brings wealth” and that one should “become wealthy before entering office” has persisted since the breakdown of primitive societies. Different officials, eras and countries have arrived at different answers.

For much of the long age of agrarian civilisation, most states lacked the resources to provide officials with a sufficiently comfortable standard of living through public funds alone. As a result, certain powers of local administration were devolved to officials in ways that also allowed them to secure benefits for themselves. These included responsibilities involving taxation, the judiciary, water management and state monopolies over salt and iron. Such arrangements arose from particular historical circumstances and, to some extent, were inevitable.

With the rise of industrial civilisation, however, material prosperity increased, and systems of governance gradually became more sophisticated. Officials’ incomes became more transparent and more rationally structured. Anyone choosing a career in public service increasingly had to accept that it was not supposed to be a path to sudden riches — at least not while they remained in office.

Attracting the right people

Broadly speaking, there are two possible ways for a society to attract capable officials without having to spend enormous sums to do so.

The first resembles the vision outlined more than a century ago by the American economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class: those who already possess substantial material wealth might choose to devote some of their leisure time to public service, whether out of personal interest or a sense of idealism.

The second resembles the approach envisaged by the US Ethics in Government Act of 1978: imposing stringent legal constraints on public officials to curb the temptation to pursue personal wealth, while complementing those restrictions with measures such as sufficiently generous salaries to discourage corruption. Combining incentives with deterrence could, in theory, cultivate a pool of talented people willing to devote themselves to public service.

Neither path, however, appears particularly easy. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that no perfect solution has yet been found. And this is before taking into account the continuing debates over the proper size of government, the direction in which it should develop and the role it should play in society.

Still, one can imagine how fascinating it would be to investigate, verify, disclose and even assess the wealth of political leaders and senior officials around the world.

The only problem is that doing so would be extraordinarily difficult.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “如何看待特朗普政府满朝巨富”.

Related: Can Trump 2.0 govern? A divided nation holds its breath | Chinese professor: Did Trump choose the wrong team?