A leader of President Donald Trump’s new effort to combat waste, fraud and abuse within federal benefit programs has a financial conflict of interest but may continue his government service anyway, according to a White House memo reviewed by NOTUS.

Jetson Leder-Luis’ “disqualifying financial interest” in Amazon.com is “not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity” of his work as deputy executive director of Trump’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, White House counsel David Warrington wrote in the memo dated April 16.

As of April, Leder-Luis’ wife owned unvested restricted stock units in Amazon.com worth a projected $237,558, according to the memo, which granted Leder-Luis a “limited waiver” from federal conflict-of-interest law.

Amazon.com is a major federal government contractor, and Amazon Web Services in particular does business across many of the federal programs that Leder-Luis, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, is charged with reviewing. Leder-Luis also began serving last year as a senior adviser for health care fraud at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“It is important that you also be able to participate in matters that focus on preventing and enforcing fraud generally in critical areas that the Task Force may be investigating or reviewing, including areas that may affect Amazon’s financial interests,” wrote Warrington, who described Leder-Luis as a “leading academic in fraud analysis” who has “engaged in cutting edge research on detecting, preventing, and enforcing fraud.”

Warrington said he based his determination in part on Leder-Luis serving as “one of multiple decision-makers,” but one who does “not exercise final decision-making authority” on the task force.

Leder-Luis did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement to NOTUS, White House senior policy adviser Joseph Simonson said: “Every member of the Task Force is in compliance with all conflicts of interest laws and federal ethics rules.”

Trump created the anti-fraud task force by executive order on March 16, focusing its work on federally funded housing, food, medical care and cash assistance programs.

Trump said in the order that “illegal aliens, criminals, foreign gangs, bureaucrats, State and local officials, non-governmental organizations, and ineligible providers exploit these programs — which are intended to provide a safety net to lawfully eligible Americans — with ease.” This, he said, has resulted in “widespread fraud, waste, and abuse at the expense of the American taxpayers who pay for and utilize these programs, contributing substantially to the national debt.”

Various public officials and politicos — Vice President JD Vance, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, Donald Trump Jr. — have touted the task force’s work.

Federal conflict-of-interest waivers are a useful tool in striking a balance between “protecting public confidence without cutting the government off from necessary expertise,” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Given the likelihood Leder-Luis’ work will intersect with Amazon’s interests, “the official and his office should actively monitor for actual and perceived conflicts,” Tillipman said. She said “the public should be concerned enough to ask whether the conflict was identified, disclosed, evaluated, and mitigated. But the facts described in the waiver, without additional information, do not suggest serious ethics concerns.”

The Trump White House has rarely issued conflicts-of-interest waivers. Aside from Leder-Luis, it’s done so for only four other officials during Trump’s second term: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Energy Secretary Chris Wright and David Sacks, a technology executive and presidential adviser for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.