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

Donald Trump Jr., from left, Howard Lutnick, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Viktor Knavs and and Barron Trump arrive at the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times via AP, Pool)

ATLANTA — President Donald Trump’s brash populism has always involved incongruence: the billionaire businessman-politician stirring the passions of millions who, regardless of the U.S. economy’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 administration.

The world’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.

“He’s bringing in folks who have had great success in the private sector,” said Debbie Dooley, an early 2015 Trump supporter and onetime national organizer in the anti-establishment Tea Party movement. “If you need to have brain surgery, you want the proven brain surgeons.”

Others raise concerns about conflicts of interest at odds with Trump’s pledge to fight for “forgotten men and women” in a country where the median household net worth is about $193,000 and median annual household income is about $81,000.

“It’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,” said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who served under President Bill Clinton and has warned for decades about the nation’s widening wealth and wage gaps.

Countered Dooley: “Trump sets the agenda. If they won’t enact his policies, then they will hear him say what we hear on ‘The Apprentice’ all the time: ‘You’re fired!’”

Here is a closer look at some of Trump’s picks, their net worth according to Forbes, 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 that’s a heavy lift politically, McMahon and Trump have endorsed an expansion of “school choice,” programs that steer taxpayer money to private school tuition. She also could be in charge of implementing Trump’s proposals to withhold federal money from public schools — K-12 and higher education — that do not meet White House demands to modify or scrap diversity programs.

Doug Burgum

The North Dakota governor (estimated net worth $1.1 billion) made his money as a software entrepreneur. Burgum impressed Trump during his own failed bid for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. As interior secretary, Burgum would be charged with implementing Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” promise — 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 Trump’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 Trump’s tax ideas. Trump tax policies, which helped widen the deficit in Trump’s first term, are juxtaposed with Bessent’s warnings about the dangers of rising U.S. debt and the cost of annual interest payments to the government’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 Trump’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. That’s not the center of commerce for the SBA’s usual clientele. The agency was founded in 1953 and describes itself as “the only cabinet-level federal agency fully dedicated to small business” by providing “counseling, capital, and contracting expertise as the nation’s only go-to resource and voice for small businesses.”

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 Loeffler’s part.

Jared Isaacman

Isaacman, another financial services billionaire, was the first wealthy individual to take a space walk through Musk’s company, SpaceX. This choice, as much as any, illustrates Trump’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.

Bill Barrow, The Associated Press