Thousands of companies are competing for billions of dollars in Defense Department contracts to build a shield designed to intercept and destroy missiles launched against the United States.
But amid intense competition, a handful of companies have an important internal connection.
At least four of the companies awarded contracts so far belong to Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm founded by billionaire Steve Feinberg, who led the company until last year and is now deputy secretary of defense — the Pentagon’s second-highest official.
Feinberg oversees the office in charge of the Golden Dome for America project, which is modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
Feinberg has filed documents indicating that he has divested from Cerberus and its related businesses. But his government ethics filings contain an unusual clause: He is allowed to continue contracting with the company for tax compliance and accounting services as well as health care coverage, a financial relationship that documents show could continue indefinitely.
Feinberg’s financial statements and ethics agreement are part of a mine of nearly 3,200 disclosure files that ProPublica is releasing today. The disclosures, which can be viewed in an online search tool, detail the finances of more than 1,500 federal officials appointed by President Donald Trump. The records of Trump and Vice President JD Vance are also included.
The documents reveal a web of financial ties between top government officials and the industries they help regulate — relationships that have come under scrutiny as Trump has dismantled ethical safeguards designed to prevent conflicts of interest.
On his first day back in office, Trump resigned a decree signed by President Joe Biden that required his appointees to adhere to an ethical commitment. This pledge prohibited them from working on issues related to their former lobbying subjects or clients for two years. Weeks later, Trump fired 17 inspectors general charged with investigating fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest in the federal government. Around the same time, he fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency that oversees ethics compliance across the executive branch. The office is currently without a chief or chief of staff.
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Against this backdrop, ProPublica has, over the past year, used disclosure records to investigate how personal financial interests intersected with government decision-making within the Trump administration.
These documents made it possible to show that senior officials of the executive branch, including Attorney General Pam Bondicarried out securities transactions at the right time, sometimes sell stocks just before the markets fall because Trump announced new tariffs. (The officials either did not respond to requests for comment or said they did not have any inside information before making their trades.)
Other revelations revealed that two high-ranking Environmental Protection Agency scientists who recently helped downgrade the agency’s assessment of the health risks of formaldehyde had previously held management positions within the main occupational group in the chemical industry. (The EPA said the scientists obtained an ethics opinion approving their work on the project.)
In December, ProPublica reported that Trump named more than 200 people who collectively owned — either alone or with their spouses — between $175 million and $340 million in cryptocurrency investments at the time they filed their returns. Some of these appointees now occupy positions overseeing or influencing regulation of the crypto industry. Among them is Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now the Justice Department’s second-highest official.
Blanche’s Disclosure Records show that he had at least $159,000 in crypto-related assets last year when he closed surveys of crypto companies, dealers and exchanges.
After ProPublica reported on Blanche’s actions, six Democratic senators accused him of a “blatant” conflict of interestand a monitoring group asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate. A Justice Department spokesperson said Blanche adhered to the highest ethical standards and that her crypto orders were “properly reported, processed and authorized in advance,” but she did not respond to questions asking who authorized her actions.
Conflicts of interest have long plagued Democratic and Republican administrations. But ethics experts say Trump’s second term marks a radical departure from modern norms.
Trump has openly defended his family’s financial enrichment while in office, including through cryptocurrency deals which critics say would allow investors, including foreign entities, to curry favor by increasing the president’s personal wealth.
“I found out that no one cares, and I have the right to do that. » Trump told the New York Timesreferring to his family’s business dealings.
Trump also makes no apologies for accepting a Boeing 747 worth about $400 million from the Qatari government and transferring nearly $1 billion from a nuclear weapons program to modernize it. Virginia Canter, chief adviser for ethics and corruption at the Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit government watchdog group, cited Trump’s new plane as a blatant example of self-serving operations.
“Ethics is in the toilet,” said Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, the Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly defended the president and his appointees. “President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history,” Kelly said. “He has also appointed highly qualified individuals to the executive branch, from a wide range of public and private sector experience. »
The idea of a space missile shield has persisted since President Ronald Reagan proposed his own version dubbed “Star Wars.”
Trump revived the idea on the campaign trail. His Golden Dome for America imagines a battery of weapons, deployed from land, sea and space, capable of destroying missiles launched at the United States.
In December, the Defense Ministry began selecting companies for the project, for which it allocated up to $151 billion. So far, the agency has awarded awards to more than 2,000 companies. Cerberus owns or is a majority investor in at least four of them: North Wind, Stratolaunch, Red River Technology and NetCentrics Corp.
Citing national security concerns, defense officials have not made public the amounts of each contract or the products or services provided by the companies. (The Department of Defense is required by law to publicly announce only contracts worth more than $9 million.)
Feinberg, co-founder of Cerberus in 1992, listed assets worth at least $2 billion when he was nominated by Trump last year. In his ethics agreement, Feinberg said he would divest his stake in the company, potentially giving assets to irrevocable trusts benefiting his adult children — a maneuver that is legal under federal conflict of interest law but that ethics experts say undermines his intent.
Feinberg also told ethics officials that he was expected to contract with Cerberus for accounting, tax and health care services in the short term, but would find other providers by April 2026. However, at Feinberg’s request, Department of Defense officials approved an extension earlier this year, allowing the financial relationship to continue without an end date. In an amendment to his ethics agreement, he said he would “pay customary and reasonable fees” for Cerberus’ services, but did not specify the amount.
It’s unclear exactly what role Feinberg played – or will play – in choosing which companies will receive contracts at the Golden Dome. In response to questions from ProPublica, the Defense Department said Feinberg was “not directly responsible for the Golden Dome acquisitions” but did not elaborate. The department would not say whether Feinberg or anyone from his office had met with representatives of the contractor.
What is not in dispute is Feinberg’s oversight of the Golden Dome initiative. Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, who is leading the project, reports directly to him.
Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said Feinberg’s continued relationship with Cerberus creates at least a perception of a conflict of interest that could undermine confidence in the fairness of the contracting process.
“That’s what President Eisenhower was worried about in the 1960s” when he attacked the military-industrial complex, Painter said of Eisenhower’s farewell speech warning of the risks of too close a relationship between the military and private defense companies.
In response to questions from ProPublica, a Cerberus spokesperson said in an email: “Mr. Feinberg has divested his ownership interest in Cerberus and any funds it manages, and is in no way involved in the operations of Cerberus or any of its portfolio companies.” The spokesperson added that the administrative services provided to Feinberg “are not related to any investment activities or transactions of Cerberus or its funds and have been pre-approved by the War Department’s Office of Ethics and the Office of Government Ethics.”
Another senior official in the department is Marc Berkowitzwho was confirmed in December as assistant secretary of defense for space policy. Upon confirmation, Berkowitz described the Golden Dome project as one of its main priorities.
Berkowitz previously worked as a space industry consultant and vice president of strategic planning at Lockheed Martin. The defense and aerospace giant was featured among the companies winning contracts at the Golden Dome days before Berkowitz’s confirmation.
Lockheed is likely to compete for a significant role in the project. The company has implemented a web page dedicated to the Golden DomeAnd Reuters reported that Lockheed is one of several companies that have received contracts to build competing prototypes of the missile defense system.
In his financial disclosure filings, Berkowitz said he received two monthly pensions from Lockheed and held between $1 million and $5 million in company stock.
Berkowitz agreed to disengage by March 18, documents show. During his confirmation hearing, he downplayed any potential role he would have in Golden Dome contract decisionsemphasizing that his position was more about politics.
A senior Defense Department official told ProPublica that Berkowitz is recusing himself from matters involving Lockheed until his remaining shares are sold.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the department’s ethics framework was “rigorous” and that Feinberg and Berkowitz fully complied with the law.
“Any claim to the contrary is fake news,” Parnell said.
Other agencies have similar ties to the industry. Across the administration, former lobbyists and business executives now hold influential positions, including Bondi, Susie Wiles, White House chief of staff and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy.
Their ties to former clients made national headlines, but ProPublica’s online search tool provides to the public an important insight in the financial dealings of a powerful and often hidden cadre of presidential appointees within the federal bureaucracy.
Reports show that after being named head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Jonathan Morrison revealed that he served for two years as director of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, the trade group that represents companies that make and use self-driving cars. He left his position in February 2024.
HAS his confirmation hearing last yearMorrison said he wants NHTSA to set national standards and play a leading role in developing the autonomous vehicle industry.
Sean Rushton, an NHTSA spokesman, said Morrison did not have to recuse himself from matters involving the autonomous vehicle group because he left the organization well before the presidential election and his appointment as highway safety administrator.
Most politicians and senior executive branch officials are required by law to file public disclosure reports of their financial information. These documents detail their financial assets, positions they hold outside of government, their spouse’s assets, debts, and recent financial transactions (such as buying or selling stocks) during a defined reporting period. Essentially, the law does not require appointees to provide exact financial values but rather a range.
At least a dozen named individuals hid the identities of previous clients, ProPublica found.
Appointees are permitted to keep the names of former clients confidential in exceptional circumstances, such as where the identity is protected by a court order or revealing the name would violate the rules of a professional licensing body. In new York and in Washington, D.C., for example, organizations that license lawyers prohibit them from reveal confidential information about a customer in most situations, including if it would be embarrassing or likely to harm the customer. Although the relationship between a client and attorney is often made public, in some cases – if, for example, a designee had conducted legal defense work for a client during a non-public criminal investigation – the client’s identity could be obscured in the financial disclosure.
Guidelines issued by the Office of Government Ethics say that such situations are unusual and “it is extremely rare for a filer to avail itself of this exception for more than a few clients.”
But in the office of the US Trade Representative, responsible for tariff policy, the head of the agency, Jamieson Greer, hid the names of more than 50 former clients from his time at King & Spaldingone of the most influential law firms in the country. In his disclosure, Greer cited New York and D.C. bar rules for not identifying clients.
Greer’s senior adviser at the federal agency, Kwan Kim, previously worked as an international trade attorney at Covington & Burling. From October 2020 to February 2025, Kim helped companies obtain federal exemptions from tariffs on steel and aluminum and defended companies accused by investigators of import-related crimes, according to a biography of Covington that has since been deleted. Kim kept the names of the 52 companies he represented secretciting DC Bar rules, disclosure documents show.
The office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.
When the names of former clients are not disclosed, it becomes virtually impossible for the public to know whether an official’s actions in government benefit a former client. Kedric Payne, ethics director at the nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, said the lack of disclosure was concerning.
“When you see these kinds of close ties between the regulated community and the new regulators, it raises a red flag,” Payne said. “Because these officials are walking an ethical tightrope where any meeting or communication with their former employer and client could become a serious conflict of interest.”
ProPublica journalists have been gathering these files for more than a year. We obtained all available information from the Office of Government Ethics. These are the key appointees who require Senate confirmation. To obtain the records of individuals in lower-level positions, we made requests to individual federal agencies. Some did not respond or responded partially; The records we requested for approximately 1,200 people were not provided.
Yet ProPublica’s online tool is the most comprehensive public source of financial disclosures from across the executive branch.
