Donald Trump still hasn’t disclosed private transition donors, missing a deadline that every other president, including Trump himself in 2016, has met for decades.
When Trump’s campaign decided to run a fully privately funded presidential transition, it also jumped through a legal loophole that would have required disclosure by Feb. 19 and a $5,000 contribution limit.
In November, Trump’s now-chief of staff, Susie Wiles, promised to voluntarily make the donors public. But Trump still hasn’t done so, and the White House hasn’t provided a timeline for when he will.
Wiles committed to disclosing the donors two days after The New York Times reported about Trump’s unprecedented break with tradition in rejecting public transition funds and services, and running entirely on private donations.
When NOTUS asked at the time for a timeline for disclosure, the transition team did not provide specifics: “The Trump-Vance transition is compliant with all applicable laws and regulations,” spokesperson Brian Hughes said in December. The White House this week did not provide a timeline for disclosure either, after NOTUS flagged that the historic deadline of Feb. 19 had come and gone.
Some of the funding to Trump’s inauguration has been made public through publicly mandated lobbying-disclosure reports, including millions from cryptocurrency platforms and dozens of donations from corporations whose leaders had publicly criticized Trump in the past.
But transition funding is different because it includes people who started giving money before Trump was elected, and in unlimited amounts. The fact that Trump hasn’t disclosed donors yet is concerning to transparency advocates.
“The public deserves to know who paid for presidential transition activities and the Trump team committed to do so,” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told NOTUS. “Transparency is vital when it comes to understanding private influence over public resources and decision-making. This promise should be kept.”
Even if the White House does follow through on Wiles’ November commitment to disclose transition funders, the public may never know how much money each individual gave.
If Trump had accepted government services, he would have been required to disclose both the names of the donors and the amounts they donated, up to $5,000 — as he did in 2016 and Biden did in 2020.
While there is some legal gray area as to whether accepting other services, like security clearances, may qualify to trigger these requirements under the Presidential Transition Act, Trump’s transition has made clear it was not interpreting the law in this way.
To date, the White House has not voluntarily disclosed either the donors or their donation amounts, leaving the public in the dark.
“If he had complied with the law, like every other president has done, we would know,” a Federal Elections Commission expert and attorney who was granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized by their law firm to speak about it, told NOTUS. “Of course, we weren’t worried about people bribing government officials, because there was a limit: $5,000. No one would believe that was a bribe, but if someone paid $2 million you’d have to wonder why.”
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.