Who’s Rich as Well as Powerful?

Today’s notice: What we know about wealth in Congress. Exclusive reporting on DOGE layoffs and the Strait of Hormuz. Establishment Democrats make their move on Graham Platner, and they are not playing around. Plus: A preview of SAVE America Act week, which even for this era is gonna be a real doozy.

THE LATEST

Capitol Gains is the name of NOTUS’ new deep dive into wealth in Congress.

Debates around congressional stock trading and the affordability crisis are animated by a pervasive feeling that Congress is increasingly in a different echelon of society. This feeling has fueled a growing cynicism among the electorate. What does the data say?

In the Senate, a whopping 73 of the 100 sitting senators have a median net worth of more than $1 million. That’s hardly representative of the U.S. population.

• The median net worth in the Senate is nearly $4.4 million — more than 70 times the Census-reported median U.S. household net worth.
  

Are there policy implications here? Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland who recently unveiled a dramatic proposal to change the tax code, thinks so. “It is part of the reason that we have a tax system that favors people who make money off of money and penalizes those who earn a paycheck through hard work,” he told NOTUS. “We need to change that.”

He is one of 11 senators with a median net worth below the median household net worth of their respective states. Van Hollen’s median net worth (not including equity in a primary residence) is $7,500.

Stock investments play a big role in lawmakers’ wealth. And some have held stocks in companies that have benefited from policies they’ve advanced.

• When Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis and Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi voted to fund DHS, they held shares in companies with big DHS contracts: Malliotakis in Boeing and Suozzi in Palantir. (Suozzi has since reportedly sold his shares and publicly said he regretted his DHS funding vote.)
  

Where power and money aren’t lining up? Speaker Mike Johnson’s median net worth hasn’t left the red since he was first elected to Congress in 2016. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy’s median net worth went from more than $2.2 million when he was elected to Congress in 2008 to nearly negative $1.1 million in his 2024 filing.

How we put this together: Here’s a detailed look at the methodology and the inherent gaps in this data.

Open tabs: War planning on Iran includes off-ramps for Trump should he choose them (NBC); Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino to retire from federal service, sources say (CBS); Aide Accused by Hegseth of Leaking Is Hired for Intelligence Job (NYT); Man charged with planting bombs near the Capitol claims he’s covered by Trump pardon (Politico)

From the State Department

D’OhGE! In July 2025, as part of the White House’s reduction-in-force initiative, the State Department laid off staff who would have been responsible for gaming out possible scenarios if the Strait of Hormuz was closed, sources told NOTUS’ Anna Kramer.

Nine former administration employees talked to us. “You dismantled the framework that any other administration would have used to engage on these very issues,” one told Anna. “In a normally functioning administration, I don’t know that we would have gotten here, because there would have been a process that would have examined the derivative, second-order and third-order effects.”

From the campaign trail

Begin, the negative campaigning in Maine has. Supporters of Gov. Janet Mills in the Democratic Senate primary have said all along that Graham Platner’s past social media posts will come back to haunt him, and now they are trying to help that process along, NOTUS’ Alex Roarty reports. In what a source close to Mills’ campaign calls a new stage in the primary, Mills will take “a more aggressive posture” that is “ready to litigate Platner’s record.”

The thinking: What seems old to you is fresh for actual voters in the June 9 primary. “The majority of voters don’t live on Twitter or digest every piece of news, and Platner hasn’t been the subject of a negative ad campaign,” the source close to Mills’ camp told Alex.

The first ad from this effort is not pretty. “Did you know Graham Platner wrote that women worried about rape need to, quote, ‘Not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to’?” a narrator intones.

FWIW, public polling has found Platner holding a consistent lead even as his tattoo/posts/previous stances have become major national stories.

From the Hill

The SAVE America Act’s moment has arrived: “I hope John Thune can get it across the line,” Donald Trump told reporters yesterday. The Senate majority leader almost assuredly cannot get the bill across the line, NOTUS’ Helen Huiskes reports, but the theater of trying will commence today.

Debate could take days and go late into the night. Thune will cut it off at some point and call for the 60 votes he needs to move the legislation forward, which he does not have. Before the virtually inevitable happens, both Democrats and Republicans have plans to occupy the floor and talk — a lot.

It will be an intensely uncomfortable slog for us all Republican supporters of the filibuster, who’ll likely find themselves under pressure from Trump and his supporters to abolish the arcane procedural hurdle to pass this bill. But Thune has said he does not have votes to do that, either.

A group opposing SAVE that does not get a ton of attention is Native American leaders, NOTUS’ Adora Brown reports. A lot of those leaders live in red states. Among their concerns: The bill’s in-person voting requirement could disenfranchise people who lack easy access to election centers. “Election services are too far, sometimes located at county seats that can be hundreds of miles away,” Jacqueline De León, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, said. “On reservation, opportunities are extremely limited, if they exist at all.”

From the courts

The next big ruling? The Supreme Court announced it will hear arguments on Trump’s bid to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian migrants. A ruling in the president’s favor could have major implications for TPS, NOTUS’ Jackie Llanos reports, as he seeks quicker ways to deport more people.

The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration last year to end the program for Venezuelans, and now the administration is asking the high court to provide guidance to lower courts on the way forward.

NEW ON NOTUS

Who did Jesse Jackson endorse? It’s a question that’s provided a fair bit of consternation in the closing hours of the race to succeed longtime Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, NOTUS’ Amelia Benavides-Colón reports. The state’s lieutenant governor, Juliana Stratton, over the weekend touted Jackson’s backing, only for his family to come out and say that an unfinished draft of the late activist’s choices had inadvertently been given to Stratton’s campaign.

One of Jackson’s children, Yusef Jackson, blamed the situation on an “internal miscommunication.”

More: Democratic AGs Sue to Stop Trump’s Rollback of Anti-Discrimination Measures at HUD, by Amelia Benavides-Colón

NOT US

• What’s Behind Trump’s New World Disorder? By Daniel Immerwahr for The New Yorker
  
• Kristi Noem Bought 11 Warehouses to Use as ICE Jails. Now What? By Nick Miroff for The Atlantic
  
• In Texas, an Unyielding Gun Culture Jumps Off YouTube and Into Politics, by Charles Homans and Thomas Gibbons-Neff for The New York Times
  
• How a Bank Robbery Case Became SCOTUS’s Next Big Fourth Amendment Test, by Matt Ford for The New Republic

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