Trump’s wealthy Cabinet picks will have to divest. But the rules make that a potentially lucrative prospect

Moving from a Wall Street corner office to a DC corner office comes at a cost: For a top financier who’s been asked to run the Treasury Department, say, you could be looking at a pay cut of tens of millions of dollars a year. On top of that, you’d have to offload any stock holdings that create a potential conflict of interest with the new gig.

Moving from a Wall Street corner office to a DC corner office comes at a cost: For a top financier who’s been asked to run the Treasury Department, say, you could be looking at a pay cut of tens of millions of dollars a year. On top of that, you’d have to offload any stock holdings that create a potential conflict of interest with the new gig. But cry not for the titans of industry who deign to take on government work. The way the rules are set up — largely unchanged from their Nixon-era origins — ensure that the many one-percenters who are vying to join the next administration are going to be just fine if confirmed, and possibly even richer than when they came in. See here: President-elect Donald Trump is assembling what is likely to be the wealthiest Cabinet in US history, with at least two known billionaires — financier Howard Lutnick as Commerce secretary and former pro-wrestling executive Linda McMahon as Education secretary — and many others who are multimillionaires with complex financial holdings. Federal ethics laws require those senior government jobs in the Cabinet and beyond to divest their individual stock holdings, lest anyone be tempted to abuse their position of power to juice their personal investments. “The rule of thumb is, recuse or divest,” said Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. “The more complex your assets are, the harder it can be to divest from them. But just because you’re outrageously rich with complicated assets doesn’t mean you get a special set of rules.” The complication arises in part because the Nixon-era conflict of interest laws were created decades before the rise of private equity and other alternative investments that now make up sizable chunks of some portfolios.