They Gutted the Watchdogs Before They Made the Appointments

By Rachel Hurley March 5th, 2026 Updated October 10th, 2026

1,500 Trump officials’ financial disclosures just went public. The pattern isn’t subtle.

ProPublica just published financial disclosure records for over 1,500 Trump appointees, and I went through it. Let me tell you about two of them.

Frank Bisignano ran Fiserv - a company that processes credit and debit card payments for banks and businesses - until Trump made him Commissioner of Social Security in May 2025. When you take a government job like that, you’re required to sell your company stock so you don’t have a financial stake in decisions you’re making. Bisignano sold about $530 million worth of Fiserv shares over the summer.

A few months later, Fiserv’s stock crashed more than 40% in a single day. The new CEO got on a call with investors and said the financial targets Bisignano had set were “objectively difficult to achieve” - which is corporate-speak for “we can’t hit the numbers the last guy promised.” Fiserv lost $30 billion in market value. If Bisignano had still owned his shares, they would have gone from $530 million to about $229 million. His government job saved him roughly $300 million.

That’s weird on its own. But here’s what senators want to know: whether Fiserv was already in contract talks with the federal government while he was being confirmed. He didn’t disclose any. A Fiserv subsidiary ended up winning a Treasury Department contract to run the Direct Express program - the debit card program that delivers Social Security and other federal benefits to more than 3.4 million Americans.

So the man who now runs Social Security used to run the company that now runs the debit cards that Social Security recipients use to get their money. Trump also made him CEO of the IRS in October. That’s a job that didn’t exist before. He now runs both agencies simultaneously.

A class action lawsuit from Fiserv investors says Bisignano misled stockholders about the company’s finances. Two Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden, launched a probe. The SSA’s official response has been that Bisignano “fully complied with all obligations required under his federal government ethics agreement.” Which technically just means he filed the right paperwork.

Now let’s talk about Paul Atkins, who Trump put in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission - the agency that’s supposed to police Wall Street and the crypto industry. When Atkins was confirmed, he personally held up to $6 million in crypto investments: stock in two crypto companies and a stake in a crypto investment fund. His consulting firm had also done work for crypto clients. He agreed to sell all of it.

The SEC under his predecessor had been suing Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken for operating as unregistered exchanges. These weren’t weak cases - the SEC was winning them. A federal judge had already refused to throw out the Coinbase case, and said in that ruling that the tokens involved were securities. The SEC dropped all three last year - Coinbase and Kraken in the two months before Atkins was sworn in, Binance about a month after - part of at least a dozen crypto cases it walked away from. He’s now publicly saying “most crypto tokens are not securities” - which is exactly what every crypto company has been arguing for years, and exactly the position that makes crypto investments more valuable. He named his regulatory agenda “Project Crypto.”

Those are two people out of 1,500 in this database.

Across the whole thing: more than 200 officials held between $175 million and $340 million in crypto when they filed their disclosures, and some of them now make crypto policy. The number-two official at the Justice Department held crypto investments when he shut down federal investigations into crypto companies. The guy who runs tariff policy refused to disclose more than 50 of his former clients - citing confidentiality rules that the ethics office says are almost never used for more than a handful of cases. His own senior adviser did the same thing with 52 clients. Two EPA scientists who just downgraded the government’s assessment of how dangerous formaldehyde is both came from the chemical industry’s main lobbying group.

Here’s the thing about all of this: most of it is legal. It’s legal because on his first day back in office, Trump got rid of the rule that prevented appointees from working on issues related to their former clients. Then he fired 17 inspectors general - the people whose job is to investigate exactly this kind of thing. Then he removed the head of the Office of Government Ethics. That office currently has no director and no chief of staff.

The rules that were supposed to flag this were cleared out before either of these two men took office.

Sources

Correction, September 28th, 2026: This essay first said Fiserv was already in contract talks with the federal government while Bisignano was being confirmed - that’s what senators are asking, not an established fact. It also said Atkins dropped the Binance, Coinbase and Kraken cases after taking over - the SEC dropped Coinbase and Kraken before he was sworn in and Binance about a month after, part of at least a dozen crypto cases it dropped. And it said 1,500 Trump officials just filed disclosures - ProPublica spent more than a year gathering those records and just published them.

Update, September 28th, 2026: A few lines now say who launched the probe into Bisignano and how the SSA has answered, and add detail on when Fiserv’s stock fell, who Direct Express serves, what the judge in the Coinbase case actually ruled, and which appointees took office after the ethics rollbacks.