The Periodically Listing Updates to Management (PLUM) Act of 2022 required the federal government to produce a directory of top government leaders and political appointees. This year, that online directory informed a special project for ProPublica.
“Political appointees don’t have to compete with other candidates for their jobs like other government employees do. They just get placed into policy and decision-making roles. The tradeoff is that they have to disclose certain things about their finances — stocks they hold, any large liabilities they have, work arrangements, ongoing or prior. So, they have to disclose this information that regular government employees don’t have to,” explained Brandon Roberts, a journalist with ProPublica’s news apps team.
“We’re journalists who code,” he explained his role. “Part of it is regular journalism stuff — running down stories, finding sources — but also, we’re trying to use data and build things that the public can use.”
One of the things Roberts, his colleague Senior News Application Developer Al Shaw and the ProPublica team built this year is a “Trump Team Financials” database, which compiles and makes searchable all the financial disclosures filed by President Trump’s 1,600 appointees.
The disclosures filed by political appointees don’t reside in a single repository. Instead, they’re maintained by numerous agencies. To request that information from each agency, journalists must file a “Form 201,” Roberts explained.
Sometimes the agencies comply with those requests, sometimes they don’t. In those cases, reporters have to work their sources inside the agencies to obtain them. Non-responses aren’t uncommon.
“Some agencies just never respond. FOIA people and ethics people have been severely gutted. There aren’t a lot left,” said Roberts.
Starting in February, ProPublica began submitting Form 201s and compiling the searchable database. In all, the team amassed nearly 3,600 documents. While the public is welcome to query the database, it has extraordinary value for journalists reporting on government, ethics and corruption.
“I think it has enabled people to do all kinds of reporting that they wouldn’t have been able to do, otherwise,” Roberts said. He cited a few examples, including reporting by The Lever, which found that the Pentagon’s chief technology officer was “a central figure in the decision to blacklist the AI company Anthropic” while owning a stake in a competitive AI developer.
“For the most part, appointees are not super conflicted,” Roberts said. “There is still an ethics process that they have to go through and divest. We did find some notable cases where they did not. [Attorney General] Todd Blanche, one of the first things he did was end all these investigations into crypto companies. The House Democrats said that was a ‘get out of jail free’ card for money launderers. We found, when he did that, he was still holding hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency. He had a personal stake in ending that regulation.
“Stephen Feinberg, who is very wealthy and runs a company called Cerberus [Capital Management], is now a top [Department of Defense] appointee. There’s a project called ‘the Golden Dome,’ a missile defense system for the U.S. A bunch of his companies are getting grants for that system, and he directly oversees that project.”
The database also informed reporting by ProPublica’s Corey G. Johnson, who found Paramount executives had been giving gifts to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) officials while the Paramount-Skydance merger was under consideration.
ProPublica’s database project illustrates the real-world value of combining technology, data and accountability journalism.
Gretchen A. Peck is E&P’s editor-in-chief. She welcomes your emails at editor@editorandpublisher.com.
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